Consequences

MRI finished and I am back home. The racket it made was different than I remembered it. There were different tones to the banging, and they came in batches, like the musical notes on a huge pipe organ. Indeed, that’s how I felt lying in that tube, with my ears and eyes covered: like I was living in an apartment among giant organ pipes, and someone was playing the instrument while I tried to rest! This fantasy took a lot of the unpleasantness out of the experience.

During the drive to Edmonton in the afternoon yesterday, my mind alternating between calculating whether or not we would miss the big storm, or be right in it, and reflecting on my place in my world post-stroke.

We did miss the storm, by the way. No tornado, but a huge thunderstorm from which the city was still dripping as we rolled into the parking lot of our residence.

What do I mean by “my place in my post-stroke world?” Prior to this event, say, last autumn, I was seen in my Presbytery as a go-to guy if you needed Sunday supply, or a short-term appointment in a congregation. I was fully able, and fully competent. Today, it’s different. I feel as though having had a brain injury changes ones status among peers. I am 78, therefore old. Today, my fantasy is that this becomes OLD, or OLD! And I have sustained a brain injury, which may, in the eyes of many, make me fragile.  I have to be careful not to overdo it. Others have to be careful as well, because I may be fragile.

If I should make a mistake, or forget someone’s name, or stumble on a step, others become agile. Perhaps I am not just fragile, but now…frail! Frailty confers a special status on one. Don’t push, or help, or expect too much, because he’s…frail. The label of ”frailty” tends to downgrade a person’s status, to remove him or her from the “go-to” position. Now, we have to be taken care, even coddled.

There is one more step down this dolorous ladder. Br frail, and forget a person, or sound a little weaker than before, or find your hips and your memory being ‘stiff’, and soon you’ll be seen as incompetent. This is a state truly that makes one a madman inside. There have been rants about it, poems about it, but little changes it in the eyes of others. Tragically, in time, your own brain accepts this and believes it. I am incompetent. I can’t do it, or think it, and I don’t have to try any more.

I don’t feel that I am very far down this ladder, but it looms before me, a kind of negative challenge. One I refuse to take at this point. Is that courage…or denial?