Deans' stroke musings: Fail, Fail again, Fail Better

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Monday, September 28, 2015

Fail, Fail again, Fail Better - Samuel Beckett

A paraphrase of the Samuel Becket quote.
'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'
A great readable book, 'Fail, Fail again, Fail Better' by Pema Chodron. It is only 131 pages long and half that is blank pages. I finished it in 30 minutes on two plane rides. If your doctor isn't telling you how many millions of times you will fail then you have a doctor that doesn't understand stroke rehab at all. You need to embrace your failures and use that resilience to recover.
So far I have probably failed 10s of millions of times. Before I die I assume I will have failed 100 million times and yet that doesn't deter from keeping on trying. To not try for me is the same as giving up and having my spirit die. That will not happen.

For those of you keeping track there are four stroke books you absolutely need to read.
'Stronger After Stroke', by Peter Levine. A stroke researcher telling you what you need to do to recover.
'Stroke After Stroke: A Rower's Pilgrimage' by Barbara Polan. A first person account of recovery that tells it like it is, not one of those, 'Look at how special I am that I recovered from a stroke'.
'My Last Degree: A Therapist Goes Home After a Stroke' by Rebecca Dutton She is an instructional OT so she has wonderful insights into how to plan your recovery.
'Fail, Fail again, Fail Better' by Pema Chodron.

Other books I have used in my recovery are here: