Janel Rejna
I'm writing with some big news. My life changed very suddenly and dramatically.
This is what I wrote in one of my e-mails about four years ago. On that day in March 2005, I became a member of the stroke survivors club. It isn’t anything I aspired to or even knew anything about, but here I am a stroke survivor. I decided to write my story because I remember being inspired by reading other survivor stories. They let me know that I wasn’t the only one, and it gave me a lot of hope. The doctors kept saying it was so rare and I was so young and one of the doctors even presented my case in one of their meetings. I was the prop showing how much I had improved. But I knew that I wasn’t back to normal and that upset me.
Before the stroke, my life was pretty normal. I was 31 years old and working as a primary school teacher. I had a little 17 month old boy and my husband and I were just enjoying our growing family, with our second child on the way. Then I got sick. It started out as a regular cold, then it got worse…
I was very sick with a flu like illness. I felt terrible and a few times I told my husband that I felt like I was going to die. I saw my GP and he said that I should just keep taking parecetamol and I would get better in few days. Then I woke up one morning and I wasn't able to talk sensibly. My husband was asking me questions and my responses were nonsense. He called the ambulance and I was off to the hospital. I had pneumonia and I was treated with antibiotics. Unfortunately, they didn't figure out that I had a stroke. Then I came home and three days later and I had another stroke. The right side of my body was paralyzed and I could barely talk. It was a very strange and scary situation.
Reading back on the e-mails that I wrote to tell friends about what happened, I was surprised at how positive and upbeat I was at the time. But I think I had a lot of other emotions, too. I felt angry with the doctors that kept telling me, “it’s just a virus.” I felt angry with the misdiagnoses on my first stay in the hospital. I also felt worried: was my baby going to be okay?, how was my little boy going to cope?, could my husband handle the stress?, would I have to have a c-section?, was I going to have another stroke?, Would I get better?
They figured out that I had a hole in my heart (PFO). Pregnancy causes the blood to clot more and because I had been ill, I wasn’t very mobile. The combination of these was probably the cause of my strokes. They treated me with Clexane, which I had to inject twice a day until after my son was born by ceasarian. After he was born, they switched me to warfarin until I had my heart procedure to repair the hole. After that I was on aspirin for 6 months.
When I had my strokes I felt very dizzy and confused. I didn’t know that I couldn’t speak normally at first. I didn’t know I was paralyzed until the doctor asked me to move my legs and squeeze his hand. I couldn’t move at all no matter how hard I tried.
Going back to work…
I'm not going back to work. I was upset when the doctor suggested it, but I guess I'm okay with it now. And it is only a few months until my maternity leave anyway.
I was very upset. I cried and I didn’t normally cry when talking to the doctors. So I didn’t go back to work. I had a year-long maternity leave and then I asked for a leave of absence for the next school year because I felt like I needed more time with my young children. Then they offered me an additional year off, which I decided to take as well. I’ve been back at work. This year I’m a teacher-librarian at the school. I was looking forward to going back to work and I felt confident that I wouldn’t have any problems related to my stroke. Since I had my baby, I’ve been taking care of my kids on my own, so I felt like I’ve already been back to work! Because I work at an international school, many of the teachers only stay for a few years. So when I went back to work many of my colleagues didn’t know anything about the stroke and I didn’t tell, until January when there was an article about me in a newspaper. But by that time, I felt it was okay to tell because they already knew me as a person, not a “stroke”
Thanks to Janel for sending in her profile. Anyone else who would like to share their story can send it along with a photograph (if you're not shy!)
- c/o PROFILES,
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