Strokiversary!

This is an especially auspicious Friday the 13th: it's my Strokiversary! I don't want to dwell on the whole stroke thing, but I thought I'd at least write out a little blurb, a sort of progress report on how things have been going since my stroke last May 13. Hard to believe it's already been a whole year.

I'll start by noting the obvious: I'm still alive and kicking. In general, I'd call myself fairly functional, and I did recover some lost skills over the past twelve months—things like being able to put on and take off my pants. My typing speed remains horrible; I'm no longer able to do 122 words per minute, and that's mainly because the brain-finger connection remains muddled. I don't always press on the keyboard's keys hard enough before moving on to the next letter; this results in skipped letters. And very often, my fingers will meatily land between keys. Both of these problems produce lots and lots of typos that I have to go back and fix, and this is what cuts my typing speed down. Right now, I think I'm just under 50 words per minute, which is depressing. Typing as slowly as I do hasn't affected my productivity at work all that much, luckily, and there are times when I think I do type quickly when I relax and stop trying to concentrate. (On a typing test, you're supposed to retype the words you see on the screen, not simply type whatever you want. This definitely affects your words-per-minute result.) Dealing with this has been a humbling lesson in patience.

A year after the stroke, I don't think I've lost my cooking skills, nor have I lost my language skills. I still speak in Korean with my Korean coworker at work, and I still write emails in French to my French family. My language centers seem more or less fine, although I wonder, sometimes, if the stroke didn't affect my French accent at least a little bit. I somehow don't feel quite as fluent anymore. Not sure what that's about.

Weight-wise, well, I immediately lost sixty pounds (28 kg, to be precise) over the first three months after my stroke, but I did regain about twenty-some pounds (10-11 kg) this past Christmas, and I've been dealing with that ever since. I'm still shooting for a goal weight of 90-some kilos by my July doctor's appointment; we'll see how that goes.

In terms of life plans, well, I still joke with people that I'll be dead by the time I'm 60. That certainly affects how I think about long-range plans. It did occur to me, a while back, that my dad had his heart attack when he was around 64. He and I no longer talk, but I assume he's been behaving himself, in terms of diet and fitness, ever since. He's married to a white American, now, so he no longer has to pick at Korean food he doesn't like (he could never eat spicy). He's over 80, now; I seriously doubt I'll live that long. That said, I'm doing what I can to keep myself from having a second stroke. I'm still struggling to find the proper balance as I continue to search for a sustainable lifestyle. I think the depressing reality is that I need to eat an extremely reduced-calorie diet to be healthy; my body greedily absorbs everything I put into it and, if I'm not working up a sweat, all those absorbed calories turn into fat. I'm the dietary incarnation of Murphy's Law, the "gains weight at the drop of a hat" guy.

That said, I have my walk along the Camino de Santiago to look forward to when I turn 60, and I'm still working on a number of book projects. It's not as though I have any reason ever to be bored; there's always something to do, and it's just a matter of doing it.

Hopefully, in another year, I'll be able to write about a second stroke-free year. I do know I was lucky that my own stroke wasn't severe; my American coworker's father had a stroke in Colorado several months after I'd had mine, and he's not doing nearly as well. My coworker says his dad can barely get around. I consider my own stroke a shot across the bow, a warning from Mother Nature about Not Overdoing It. Well, I'm listening, and I've retained the moral lesson that what I put in my body is a matter of life and death. That said, I'm not going to deprive myself of the pleasure of living; it's just a matter of striking the right balance, as I alluded to above: I must behave myself, but I should also cut loose once in a while.

May you also remain happy and healthy and stroke-free. As Tyrone the Six-fingered Man says in "The Princess Bride," "If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything."