Optimize Health by Living Passion

First a little background…

Madame’s stroke five years ago hit both sides of her brain. It caused a massive amount of damage and she was in a coma for ten days. When she first became responsive she couldn’t move anything except her head and she almost couldn’t talk.

Slowly over the following days she regained her ability to move and use her right hand. More days and she could move and use her right leg. Much more slowly and with many continuing issues she can move and use her left leg.  Her left arm remains very compromised.

She is a fiber artist who used to spin and weave, crochet and knit, and who made beautiful hand-dyed silk Japanese bondage rope. Madame gleefully hung people from many a ceiling in skillful webs of Shibari-style suspensions.

Since the stroke she has been unable to do any of those things. She has felt this painful loss most keenly.

Her words, once so quick and clever, were reduced to “yes, no, and ok”, with little connection to what she really meant to say.

Another painful loss and lingering issue.

Now Madame is able to say two or three sentences in a row…occasionally more…and mostly her meaning is clear.

And I am constantly amazed how much she manages to convey in those few words.

The Madame who, before the stroke, was my best friend and confidant, after the stroke, is the same insightful clever woman I have loved for most of a decade.

The stroke didn’t take her away…it did create some interesting challenges.

The Doctors Give Up

When Madame first had the stroke, she was in the hospital for about a month. She spent another two weeks or so in a Rehabilitation facility.

I heard the doctors who treated her in the hospital say her prognosis was very poor. She was going to need 24/7 care for the rest of her life. That there was nothing they could do for her and we should start hunting up a nursing home for her. She didn’t die from the stroke and she isn’t likely to get much better. Her body is basically healthy though, so she is likely to live another decade or two…in a nursing home.

Madame… rope top, whip top, sadist extraordinaire… in a vanilla nursing home. There is not much to be found, in the way of kinky nursing homes, in the world. I knew being put into a nursing home to be one of Madame’s deepest fears.

She used to tell me stories about her favorite grandmother who spent about ten years in one. Every time Madame visited her grandmother, she would beg to be taken home. It nearly broke her heart. I heard her say she was terrified of a similar fate.

Madame’s not quite ex-husband, at the time, advocated for her to go to Rehab. She went.

A couple of weeks later her insurance declared she was failing to progress and stopped paying for the rehabilitation facility.

I asked for, and got, her family’s support for me to take care of her at home.

Madame and I, and the rest of my chosen family, embarked upon an exploration into the wilds of possibility.

Radical Rehab is Born

I will never forget the day I went to get her out of the Rehab place.