We were forced to manage my rehab independently

By Rebecca Moore

I am a nurse and I have been travelling around Australia with my husband for the last eight years.

Our life has been one great adventure, and then I had a stroke.

It was in November in 2022, and we were in Alice Springs. I had just got home from work, and I was texting my son. I went to reply but I couldn’t work out how to type and I began to feel dizzy.

My husband Grant, who is also a nurse, did the F.A.S.T. questions and realised something wrong. He took me straight to hospital.

I don’t recall that night at all. I was awake. I was calm and peaceful, but I don’t have any memories of what happened.

I was taken for a CT scan and diagnosed with a migraine, but the next day I was given an MRI which showed four clots in my brain caused by a hole in my heart. There are no neurologists in Alice Springs, so I was moved to Townsville, where I had a PFO closure.

The stroke left me with aphasia. I was told I wouldn’t improve, and it would be highly unlikely I’d ever get back into nursing.

So, my husband Grant took 15 months off work and and became my therapist. And through his focus and dedication I am now back at work.

I have described what rehab activities Grant, and I did every day at the bottom of this blog – they worked for me.

But I still can’t fathom how Grant took it all in. The grief of losing the person you knew so well. He had to become a teacher, therapist, emotional support person for himself, our children, family and friends. And had to make life changing decisions for both of us.

It would have been exhausting physically and mentally for him, but he never wavered. I don’t know if I will ever understand the full extent of what he went through, I can only thank him from the bottom of my heart.

I would like to dedicate this blog to my husband, because without him I would still be trapped in my brain like a prisoner and in a world that didn’t make sense.

Grant was the absolute comfort that my broken brain needed.

Our self-directed rehab activities – I hope that they can help someone else.

Firstly, learning to read, write, comprehend and talk again - it's going to take time. For me it is a process that never seems to end. I do a similar thing each day and it’s a systematic approach which helps me.

In the early months.......

I would get up each day and go over the things I had learnt the day before. If I had forgotten what I had learned, I would learn them again. Only after doing this, would I start something new.

We read simple books together. When I couldn’t understand the concepts, we created images and added four things to the image. We would read and discuss the image or paragraph until I could say it out loud and understand it. Our first book took nine months to read.

We did art therapy because it gave my brain a break. I didn’t have to think and created using the part of my brain that wasn’t damaged – I learned colours this way.

Music therapy was great, it gave me a rhythm to talk along to. I preferred country music, and the lyrics gave me new words and a way to interpret them. Music therapy also helped my fluency. I used bone conduction headphones so I could have a conversation with someone and have music playing at the same time. This worked for me, and it helped me to put more emotion into my monotone voice.

We practised a tongue twister daily, which was fun. But the muscles in my face were always painful after doing it.

I graduated to going to shops, Bunnings was first. We would start in a corner and Grant would tell me what objects were and tell me a story about how it could be used. The whole time I would be feeling the object and examine how it worked. After I had learned a few items we would go back to the start, and I would tell a story back to Grant. We repeated this until I understood what objects were and how to use them.

We did this walking in nature too. Grant even took me to a snake farm so I could hold a snake and a baby crocodile. It was all part of learning and creating new pathways in my brain.

But the most important activity was socialising with friends and family. This was wonderful for my mental health and my speech. When I was more confident, I was motivated to meet new people too.

I found that embracing mistakes was important too. By that, I mean embracing the logic behind the error. It helped me to map out situations in my mind, and over time I can now interpret situations and remember what to do. This keeps me safer and gives me more confidence to be independent.

From StrokeLine: Self-directed therapy can lead to incredible results as it did for Rebecca, but everyone is different and we would always recommend seeking input from a rehabilitation team or therapists. We know it can be difficult to access therapy in some areas. You might also be interested in one of our StrokeLine Speech Pathologists tips on self-directed speech therapy here. If you have questions or need advice about self-directed rehab of finding therapist in your local area, please call StrokeLine 1800 787 653