Ignorance isn't always bliss
Once again today, I heard the phrase that everytime someone says it to Patrick, sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me: But you're too young to have had a stroke!
I always smile, and stay positive, after all, they are merely expressing their ignorance of strokes and stroke survivors. Oh, I'm sorry- I said I 'stay positive'. What I meant to say was, they are just trying to say they are shocked someone who is not 'elderly' suffered a stroke. They mean no harm, so thats why I put on my colgate smile and clamp down firmly on my tongue.
The truth is, I want to scream at them, "This could have been you! You are just as likely to have a stroke as him! He wasn't overweight; he doesn't drink; he quit smoking three years before his stroke; he doesn't have a family history of stroke; and he had just finished his usual exercise routine of running on the treadmill. It could have been YOU!"
And then this dark, sinister thought creeps in the back of my mind and whispers in my ear, "Why couldn't it have been you- not him." The nice me retorts, "What an awful thing to think!" But the sinister me says, "But you do, don't you! You would wish this devistating condition on someone else, if it meant you could have your love and your life back to the way it was." I fear that the sinister me is right.
And worse yet, a little over a year ago I could have been the offendee. I would have been among the ignorant who only thought strokes happened to the old, the over-weight, or the over-stressed.
***
I often find myself "people watching" now, much more than I ever did pre-stroke/caretaker days. I will see an able-bodied man walking across a parking lot and wish my husband still had the casual carefree manerisms of the complete stranger crossing my path. I wonder why it had to be my husband that had been chosen by fate, God, or random luck to have this "cross to bare". I find myself sometimes resentful of this stranger that he has been spared-at least for now- and he has no idea the gift he has.
I watch the elderly couple, still together (and still driving ??? :yikes: ) and wonder, "will we ever get to be that old couple? Has our chance to grow old together already been taken by this stroke? Will I know when it's time to hand over the keys?"
Kristen
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