Still High from the Weekend

Monday’s high was a mere 13°. Sigh. But I got a wee bit of gardening done that I’d wanted to do. Mostly, I napped, read, did some shopping, and took two walks with Her Highness. My day was dedicated to recovery and enjoying the thrill of being home and the performance and film making behind me.

For the next several days, it is going to be sunny, which is nice, but for the next couple of months, I have nothing demanding on my plate. I had such a good time this past weekend, but it takes a lot out of me. The amazing thing is that I didn’t even come close to having a seizure. As I wrote here a few days ago, the progress in my neurological recovery is palpable.

My lungs are another story. I’m having monthly tests now, but I am also avoiding hills again and walking slowly. On Sunday evening, when I had half an hour to get some food at Thrifty Foods before the ferry arrived, I hurried to get there and thought I might collapse. It was very painful; I was so completely out of breath. The loss of lung power scares me. 

•

The challenge of experiences such as my recent weekend is the stimulation.

During the trip, as I mentioned here yesterday, we hit kilometres of traffic on the highway. At one point after coming down a long steep hill called The Cut, we entered onto a small bridge and, being on the flat shoreline and about to rise toward the bridge, I could see the traffic jam extending onto overhead bridges, access roads and on the bridge itself. It got me shaking and hyperventilating, but I didn’t have a seizure.

It hurts to see all those cars. It really hurts to be in one in a tsunami of vehicles going in every direction and overhead on overpasses. It hurts my brain. It was extreme overstimulation. Urban life is not sustainable for me. Seeing columns of balconies the size of carpets, it sickened me to think of life in a tower. Elevators are sewers to my brain.

This angst of the trip, however, was blown out of my mind once I was in the company of my community of stutterers and allies, for the first time in my life. It was highly effective medicine. I did myself well by introducing myself to my local community with my monologue. I was Mr. Joy-Boy all weekend.

At the film shoot. I met James, and I had another immediately intimate friendship growing. He is in the film when the voice-over is about aphasia. I learned a lot about aphasics from him in the most comfortable conversation imaginable. We are family. We have speech challenges, and we can talk about them so fearlessly with each other.

•

This morning, when I went out for wood with which to light a fire, it was 6° outside. Brrrrr! But it’s another sunny day, so we’ll enjoy our walks, I’ll read and do chores.