The Anonymous Widower

A Year On

It is now over a year since I had the stroke in Hong Kong and as you know I’ve now moved to London, just round the corner from where my grandmother was born in the Balls Pond Road. In fact, I drink in the pub, where my great-grandfather might have wetted her head.

So how am I feeling?

Bodily, I have few issues.

My nails used to be firm and hard, but now they are soft and brittle.  My toenails are actually worse than my fingers. My nails were always soft before I went gluten-free and I used to bite them badly and my skin too. I’m not biting them now at all.

Q 1. Could it be that as my body is repairing itself from the stroke, it’s using up what I need for healthy nails?

I have an almost cramp-like pain in my left lower leg, which is very like the pain I got, when I trod on a razor shell on the beach in Norfolk in the summer of 2009. It tends to get worse at night.

My left humerus is also painful a lot of the time at the same place where it was broken by a bully at school.  I think as the nerves for my arm and hand pass close to the bone, it affects them at times.

I did have pain at the end of my spine, but now that has virtually gone unless I sit on the wrong sort of chair. This again was an old injury, which was very much aggravated by the hospital bed in Hong Kong.  I should say that I always sleep face down because of the end of my spine, which curls outwards and I get less cramp in my lower leg, which I’ve always had since a child.  I can still feel the cold lino, which I used to put my foot on to cure it.

It’s almost as if my old physical problems have come back!

Q. 2 Does your brain develop new pathways to get round the pain from injuries?

Q.3 When you have a stroke are these pathways knocked out? So if so, it would seem you need to develop them again.  One psychologist at Cambridge, who worked with stroke patients thought this could be the case.

Facially, I haven’t too much pain, but my scalp and left hand side are rather tender.  My skin actually feels like it did at times before I went on a gluten-free diet before I was diagnosed as a coeliac. One of my main symptoms of coeliac disease was chronic dandruff.  It went immediately, I changed to a totally gluten-free diet.

In fact, at some times, I feel like I’ve been glutened.  Not seriously, but my motions are rather loose nearly all the time.  Full tests at Addenbrooke’s have shown that there is nothing serious there, although I haven’t had another endoscopy to see what my gut is like.

Q.4 Is this connected with any of the drugs I’m taking?

On advice from my previous GP, I do take calcium tablets with added vitamin D, as it was slightly low.  But a Dexascan showed everything was fine.

I have just re-read a post on this blog, which was a pain diary, describing how I was trying to control the terrible pain I was having last summer, with codeine and paracetamol.  It wasn’t that successful and a few days later or so, I collapsed and ended up in Addenbrooke’s.  Nothing was done and I just struggled on.  And then a few weeks later, I ended up having a fit like symptom, when I was putting on my coat.  I can remember feeling a bolt of pain in my humerus and then I went into oscillation. It’s funny, but I may remember something similar happening, just after I broke the bone, as I walked home from school. Addenbrooke’s put me on Keppra to stop it happening again. It hasn’t.

Q.5 Should I keep taking the Keppra?

I incidentally take it with vitamin B6 to avoid any side effects, but also as I’ve been advised by a Dutch doctor to take B6 anyway, as he feels that coeliacs should take it to reduce the risk of strokes.

Because of the pain and because it felt like someone was pouring awful muck down my throat, I went to see an ENT specialist to see if my sinuses were bad.

He found everything clear, but thought that I was suffering from a serious pollen allergy.  Now as a child, I was very sickly and was always off school. In my first year at Grammar School I virtually missed all the second term. Gradually it got better and it really improved when first we went to live on the 11th floor in the Barbican and later when I started flying aircraft for pleasure.

I’ve also had some bad winters and springs before, but not as bad as this one, when for much of the time, I just couldn’t breathe. Although in the last twenty years or so, I’ve lived on top of a hill with a strong westerly wind and my late wife and I could afford to take holidays in the sun in January. Funnily, my cardiologist,said that everybody should take two weeks in the sun every winter.  I did try to do this in April by going to Greece and backpacking around the islands, but was irritated by everyone smoking all the time. 

I know from travelling around the UK in the last year, that when I get out of the pollen I feel better.  For instance, I went to Barnsley in March on a breezy day to see the football and felt a lot better that day. On the other hand, I walked past a tree-shredding machine at Euston a couple of weeks ago and it set me off coughing for half-an-hour.

Q.6 So why should all of this reaction to allergens get so much worse after the stroke?

On the other hand, in 2009, I was travelling to Holland a lot in the spring and suffered worse than I had done for years.  I put it down to different pollens at different times.  It was almost as if I got used to the English ones and then when I went to Holland, a load of different ones set me off.

Some days it’s so bad that all I can do is lie down indoors and listen to the radio. On the other hand, when I went down the London sewers, it helped my breathing immensely.

So how am I managing otherwise.

I have no problem getting around on buses and trains and of course by walking.  I did fall over on a bad pavement in Upper Street in March, but haven’t hardly stumbled since, especially since I was fitted properly for a pair of trainers. I have no problems using the top decks of buses and climbing up and down ladders.

I like cooking and do quite a bit, although, as there are now so many Carluccio’s with a gluten-free menu, I am lazy quite a bit of the time.

I do eat a lot of soft comfort food, like bananas and ginger cake between meals. But my weight is still the same as it was five or six years ago.

My only problem with cooking is that my left hand diesn’t seem to like hot or cold, although the finger movement is now almost back to normal.  I notice this most with my typing, where although I type mainly one-handed, I now use the left properly for the shift.  Incidentally, I’ve always typed with my right hand, because of my bad left arm.

My eyesight to the left isn’t good, but in the last month or so, I’ve been able to play table tennis again, something that I couldn’t do a year ago. On the other hand, it does seem to be worst, when my eyes are streaming from the allergies.

On a mental state, what more is there to say, other than that I’m here. I made a good fist of a lecture at Liverpool University, so my brain can’t be that awry.  Although, I do forget things on a short-term basis.  But then I always have to a certain extent.  But the long term memory is intact!

May 23, 2011 Posted by AnonW | Health, Transport/Travel | Coeliac/Gluten-Free, Stroke | 1 Comment