The symptoms remain a bit strange, and it's strange how they come and go: why would I be so tired after a stroke? It's not as though it involved any work.
Just shaved and showered; it was almost all I could manage, and I'm shaking from the effort of standing, of focusing on using my hands to wash my hair. But tomorrow is Gay Pride in Newcastle, and I really want to go – though it will probably be raining through the whole thing. It's so seldom that anything gay and festive happens here....
One of Ray Bradbury's eeriest stories, 'All Summer in a Day', involves a class of young schoolchildren on Venus and the shy, lonely new girl, who is an object of jeering and fun to the ones who grew up there. Bradbury emphasizes that the sun only shines on Venus for an hour or so, once every ten years; that time is about to occur in the story, and the class writes about it beforehand – the new girl's poem being the saddest and most poignant, as she is a recent transplant from Earth. The other kids, teasing and fighting, shut her up in a closet, and then the sun comes out, and they are all so entranced that they forget all about her... until the hour is over, and the endless rain starts in again. Whereupon they remember to let her out....
From what I can remember of looking after people who'd had strokes they ALL got absurdly tired for months afterwards and really had to pace themselves and do the whole old-fashioned gentle convalescence bit. Plus, if you're expecting anything spectacularly gay and festive in England, the North East at that, then perhaps the cognitive effects are worse than you realise!?
Posted by: Kit Eltringham | July 18, 2009 at 04:19 PM