16th. August: The second week of recovery at home doesn't begin well. I have severe head pains through the night and wonder if I should go to A&E. I end up back at the G.P on Monday morning but there are no neurological signs of a further stroke, so I go home and have a Very Quiet Day. I might have overdone things at the weekend as I'd felt so well on Sunday, the day had felt almost 'normal'. I'd helped with some gardening, we'd had a walk, I even cooked dinner and I hadn't needed a rest. Since recovery isn't going to be linear, it would really help to have some guidance on what is normal and what isn't.
I have to start listening to my brain and when it hurts, I think it means I've done too much or it needs more water. I reduce the number of visits to one a day and allow for a long rest after lunch. I can sleep for a couple of hours in the afternoon and still sleep at night. I've read that tiredness is a common side effect of a stroke.
Despite the poor start, progress is obvious. I do have fewer headaches and by the end of the week I've driven to a shopping centre and have filled up the car with petrol. I notice how hard it is to filter out competing sounds outside and that I can concentrate on only one thing at a time. I find it tiring to listen to too much conversation. Oh no, I've been left with a male brain!
I have the medical for my new job, obviously a bit more serious than it might otherwise have been. But it doesn't amount to much, more of a chat really and I'm out in twenty minutes. It doesn't look as though any 'adjustments' will be needed. I think I'll have to be a bit careful in secondary schools at lesson changeover times (to avoid being trampled underfoot) and plan my days carefully at first so that I'm not rushing from one thing to another but otherwise, six weeks from now I can't imagine I'll have too many problems. I walk to the railway station to get a taxi home and am hit by a wall of weariness.
One of the changes I want to make is to avoid rushing to the supermarket at nine on a Sunday morning, so I explore Ocado and compose my first shopping list, which I manage to save under the imaginative heading 'Morag's list.' It takes me about one and a half hours, longer than the supermarket but now I have a list I should speed up, unless I get distracted by all the recipes and special offers. It's delivered on Saturday night and I'm pleased that they promise to take away all the carrier bags next time. I have shopped by internet before but the excessive use of bags put me off. I discover that I'm no good at estimating metric weights when I receive a huge box of washing powder. Being raised on imperial measures, the difference between 500g and 1000g, for example, isn't something I can easily visualise. For some reason, I seem to have ordered two packs of minted lamb meatballs. Oh well, at least there are no substitutions. I'll get better at it.
I promise myself that when the insurance money arrives for the cancelled holiday, I'll treat myself to a new computer. I only do three things in a day on my computer; e-mails, Facebook and my blog but it can take hours because of internet problems. It's the one area of my life where 'slow' isn't positive.
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