Should have been just another bike ride
Brian Harrison

I will remember Sunday the 30th January 2005 forever. A winter's day that should have been just another long and lonely cycle ride along a coastal route in Northern Ireland. You see, I'm a mad keen cyclist and on this day I was a bit late setting out after waiting on my training partner to finish work. I waited a while but knowing the route was 75 miles I thought the light might fade quickly so I set off alone without money or a mobile phone at 11.45 exactly. I know that because my heart rate monitor tells me, even today as I write this the details are right there on my watch.

I'd ridden for about an hour with no problems keeping a steady pace and in my target zone heart rate, when I noticed my right cheek beside my ear was feeling numb. I put it down to the cold, and carried on riding. When I tried to drink from my bottles I could feel the water run right out of my mouth as though I'd been to the dentist and had an injection, something wasn't quite right. I carried on riding regardless and tried to eat a cereal bar but couldn't chew properly. At this point I was getting concerned and after another 20 minutes decided to pull up before getting into remote countryside. I felt no pain just a strange sensation in my cheek and then the left arm, so I walked up to the door of a house and when a lady answered I mumbled to her 'there's something wrong with my brain', and lay on her doorstep whilst she called an ambulance.

As I lay there numb with shock I began to wonder what could be wrong. The ambulance arrived and the medic quickly checked me over saying 'You've had a stroke'. I didn't know it but I couldn't move my left side at all and as they coupled me to a drip, oxygen mask and ECG machine all I could say was 'No way mate I'm only 38 years old and there's nothing wrong with my heart'! We arrived at Antrim hospital and I remember the nurses wanting to cut my cycling shoes off, but I wasn't having that and somehow explained how they unclip. I was vomiting quite heavily now and was given a CT scan and got transferred to Belfast Royal Victoria hospitals neurology ward. I'd had a bleed on the brain due to an AVM rupture, causing a stroke to my left side. Looking back even at that point I thought I'd be out in a day or two and back cycling within the week! After all what was an AVM?

Over the next day or so I couldn't tell where I was, the time or anything much. My wife Emma came to me every day and she'd got hold of my mum and dad and they came to see me. In the state I was in I couldn't hold back the tears when I saw them, my dad brought me cycling books in but I never looked at them. I also refused to see good friends fearing they'd see me as a death waiting to happen. I had my angiogram after a couple of days confirming a bleed from the AVM but I knew no other information at all, nor did I care to know. I was having a bad time with the headaches and could stomach no food at all. I thought it was their hospital food but I now know it was my appetite. I couldn't eat a thing. I got by on yoghurt and the odd ice cream but even they were hard work in truth.

What a place the Royal is though, the nurses were all gorgeous and worked so hard and there I was coupled up to a catheter all day and night! When my brother came to see me he brought cold strips of gel to put on my head, when they wouldn't work I'd get the nurses to run a flannel under the tap. I did anything to get through the day so I could try to sleep through the night loaded up on codeine jabs such was the pain. The jabs made me sleep but you had to be wary of leaving enough jabs to get through the night as nothing else seemed to work. The tablets had no effect and when I got the balance wrong the headaches were pure hell.

As the days passed, I watched people come and go, whilst lying in bed asking the nurses to turn me over occasionally. I'd watch the physiotherapists try to get people up and mobile. Some refused and I asked them to get me up instead. I'd not yet been cleared by the consultant to begin that so the days started to drag on. I developed a urine infection that meant the catheter had to come out thank god. Trouble was I couldn't pee, the muscles just didn't want to know so they pumped me full of water and two of the nurses poured water out of a jug into another glass to give me the urge and eventually I cried real tears when I finally let go. I can laugh now but at the time it was sheer hell! It remained very hard to pee for days after. It was around this time that I began to notice I could move my left foot a bit, nothing very noticeable just a slight nod, but there was nothing at all in the left arm which worried me deeply.

Eventually the physios began to mobilise me. They sat me up in a weird chair and all swarmed around me trying to evaluate trunk movements and posture etc. The chair made me sick just sitting in it and I hated it badly and it gave me headaches. Emma and my brother Paul later told me I looked like a madman in it. After about three weeks two physio girls began to try and walk me, though there was little I could do. It was more a case of being propped up and dragged along but I was on my feet for the first time and they said they thought I would walk again. Trouble was I knew I would walk again but I tried to walk for myself one day and fell over. I got a bit of a talking to for that one. The nurses and doctors there had been fantastic but it was time to go back to Antrim hospital as the consultant thought I should continue to recover and allow the bleeding to settle.

They transferred me on a weekend to a side room at Antrim and I hit rock bottom for the first time, why I don't know but I had begun to hate myself and had thought it better to have just ridden on till I went under the wheels of a lorry or bled to death. Unexpectedly a mate walked in out of nowhere to visit me and I realised there were so many people rooting for me it wasn't really time to give up yet. There was no physiotherapy at the weekend which I hated missing having just started out hobbling around.

When Monday morning arrived my physiotherapist Janice, came to get me from my slumber. She immediately told me to start looking like a sportsman and not a victim which sort of shocked me. I had been wearing pyjamas and baggy tops which did nothing for a cyclist who had lost two stones in 4 weeks! I began hobbling around but I knew that I had regained some power in the leg but still nothing in the arm. After a week Janice hinted I could be let home soon. This was all I wanted and I lied through my teeth about my house having a double handrail and easy access to shower etc, I wanted out badly. Unfortunately she waited for Emma to come before checking with her about the handrail and my plan was ruined for a day or two while we had rails fitted.

I was let out and returned home which was very strange. The phone rang constantly and I was worn out all the time, I couldn't tolerate bright light, read a book without missing the next line, or use the computer for very long. Then after just five days at home I started to get the most horrific headaches imaginable. I just lay in bed in agony. I got by for the first night but when it started the next evening Emma called the Doctor and I was taken into Antrim hospital again. I was vomiting badly and writhing in agony I just wanted the pain to stop. Fearing another bleed a CT scan was done and I was given morphine jabs. What blessed relief!

It seemed no one could decide what to do so I went back to the Royal in Belfast expecting a repeat angiogram which never happened. They could not fit me in so I was released after nearly a week of waiting around. I went to see my GP on the Monday and my employer paid for me to have an MRI scan done just before I went in for the repeat angiogram days later. No one told me anything, so I started on community rehabilitation four or five days a week with two great girls who were very dedicated. I progressed well and then attended the Joss Cardwell rehab clinic in Belfast for daily physio and occupational therapy for four weeks.

By this time the weight I had lost was coming back on but it wasn't plain sailing as I had some very down days and some binge drinking sessions which were the last thing you need after an injury like mine. I couldn't get my head around why this should affect a perfectly healthy person and destroy their whole lifestyle. One day Emma even caught me counting out the aspirins in the bedroom, I felt that low. As the spring weather arrived I only wanted to be riding a bike, every day. I couldn't even sit on the thing, much less grip the bars. But the clinic made me realise there were far worse off people than me, my bleed had affected the left side of the body and I could see that if the right side was affected you were having far worse problems. Not only that but I could now walk strongly with no help needed, in fact one of the doctors who saw me in the beginning could not believe I was walking, he thought I'd be dragging the leg behind me. That picked me up no end!

In mid June I suffered a seizure which was a full on job and terrified the life out of me as I thought it was the start of a new bleed. I was CT scanned again at Antrim hospital where one of the nurses begged me not to be sick on her for the third visit in a row! I now take Epilim but my fears of another seizure remain.

The clinic got me to a point were there was little more they could achieve and gave me home exercises to do as an outpatient, and I still see their psychologist a bit. The left arm is much stronger now but the hand is very poor, of no real use at all but I remain hopeful on that one. I still have bad days as we all do but life goes on whatever happens to me. I have my concerns over my overall treatment plan for the AVM as I'm only scheduled for a follow up consultation in March 2006, fourteen months after the bleed!

My whole family has been very good and I know I'm not easy to live with, cluttering up the house and frustrated by my limitations but the AVM site is a great source of comfort and there are many people rooting for me so I will be fine. At the end of the day I'm sitting here writing this and there are far too many people in worse situations than mine! My advice would be to keep battling and take each day as it comes. This time next year I'm hoping to have cycled Lands End to John O'Groats for the second time in my life! Enjoy your lives people!
Brian

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