Stroke Recovery: What quality of life can a patient expect?

The quality of life changes when you feel empowered and have the tools to deal with your stroke.

How do we at Birkdale Neuro Rehab Centre assist in this journey?

Stroke is devastating, the disabling effects of stroke are much more than just loss of movements on one side of the body.

Emotionally:    Feeling vulnerable and not being the same person you were before stroke.  Losing your identity and your role in the family, dealing with this new situation and finding it hard to manage people’s questions and expectations.

Sensation:     Inability to feel one side of your body.  Sensation of the body is altered.  Because you cannot feel the affected side it is unlikely that you would bear weight on it or even pay any attention to it.

Neglect:     some time you cannot see one side of your body and therefore pay little attention to that side.

 Movement:      you are unable to plan movements and every movement is heavy and difficult. Or you may find it difficult to remember sequence of activities.

Eyes movements:    at times there may be loss of vision in one quarter of the visual field.

Eye movements and perception of the world can be altered eg you might have difficulty in going through narrow spaces, or find it hard to judge the speed with which people or objects are approaching you.

Balance:  is affected in sitting; you fall to one side and feel nervous to shift the weight towards the affected side.

Coming up to standing, you use the unaffected leg to push up and feel nervous using the affected side.

In standing all your weight is on the unaffected side.

Eyes are key for learning to balance yourself and you may find it hard to look towards the affected side and as such you cannot counter balance.

Other symptoms: The bowel and bladder often resume their normality after a while.

The good news is that at Birkdale Neuro Rehabilitation Centre we work with you and plan the treatment together so that you can relearn some of the skills you have lost.

We also work with visual perception difficulty you may have and finally we work with eye directed body movements.   All this improve quality of movements as well as enable you to remember the sequence of movements.

The family as well as the person with stroke are to deal with the emotional aspect of the loss of identity and change of roles. We are offering different workshops with a highly skilled psychotherapist to help to come in to terms with issues arising from stroke.