Hi, I’m Michael, and I’m a stroke survivor.
Over the Christmas period, cleaning up at home, I finally tackled a box I had avoided for a long time. My original rehab kit from the early days after my stroke.
Inside were all the tools I used while relearning how to function. Most of it was plain, boring and unimpressive. A small plastic container of pegs and pieces of macaroni. I used to pick them up one at a time and place them on the table, then reverse the process and put them back. Rehab is often mind-numbingly boring. Those boring tasks make all the difference.
Speech therapy homework
There were stacks of papers from my speech therapist. Diaphragmatic breathing exercises to help me project my voice. Phonetic spellings for pronunciation drills, “Auto-matt-ick” for automatic. Pages and pages of poetry, because the rhythm helped and the unconventional word order meant my brain could not skip ahead. I had to concentrate on each word, one at a time. It was exhausting. And it worked.
Occupational therapy and the bloody letter S
On top of the macaroni and pegs were worksheets from my occupational therapist. Children’s writing sheets. Tracing capital O clockwise, then anti-clockwise. Capital U, straight, curve, straight again. And that bloody S. There were also adult-sized training chopsticks from Japan, two sticks joined by a hinge, used to rebuild strength and control in my weak forefinger. Humbling tools. Effective ones.
The paper keyboard
At the bottom of the box was my paper keyboard. An A4 sheet with a full QWERTY layout, numbers across the top, and common phrases down the sides: yes, no, it starts with, new word, I’d like to ask you something, I’m not sure, I’ll start again, thanks. I carried that thing everywhere. Around the house, to cafes, to meetings, to hospital appointments, even on holidays. It was my lifeline when I could not speak.
Wheel of Fortune, stroke edition
I still remember people trying to decipher what I was typing, my own version of Wheel of Fortune. Me tapping letters, them guessing words, everyone confused. Made more interesting by apraxia, which makes forming coherent sentences hard in the first place. Gold stars to anyone who stayed patient and actually worked out what I meant.
Why the driven are built for this
Here is what struck me, packing it away. There is nothing inspiring about picking up macaroni with a peg. Nobody posts it. There is no applause for tracing a capital S for the hundredth time. It is just reps. Boring, humbling, repetitive reps.
And that is exactly why a driven person has an edge in recovery that nobody talks about. The trait that built your career, the willingness to do the dull, hard work long after it stops being interesting, is the single most useful thing you own after a stroke. Recovery is not a breakthrough moment. It is a thousand unglamorous repetitions, and you already know how to grind.
If you are bringing someone back from a stroke, understand what that box represents. Behind the colleague who looks recovered are months of macaroni and pegs you never saw. They did not get lucky. They did the reps.
I don’t often stop to reflect on how far I have come, and I hate the word inspiring. But it is impossible not to see the progress when it is laid out in plastic containers, worksheets, and a battered piece of paper that once gave me a voice. That box did its job. So did the discipline that filled it.