Roger Carberry
Saturday, 6th August 1966, I will always remember that day.
I was a 14 year old schoolboy with everything to look forward to. I had just finished my O-levels (GCSEs today, a year early) and the only thing I had to worry me was which A-levels I would do the following year.
I lived in a small village called Knott End, close to Fleetwood in Lancashire.
I had been playing football with some friends the previous evening and have no memory of anything untoward happening, but later information suggested I had cried out in pain, after heading the football! I had gone home and after watching some television, I had gone to bed. When I woke up, by an alarm clock set to wake me for my part time job as a milkman's assistant, I felt groggy, and everything seemed as though I was still asleep. I managed to dress myself with some difficulty and was not aware at the time that my bowels had emptied and there were faeces all over my pyjamas. My right arm and leg felt very heavy and would not work properly.
At the time I did not know but I had had a CVA, cerebral vascular accident, and I was paralysed all down the right hand side, and could not speak well. Fortunately my visual pathway was still sound.
As it was early, I did not wake my mother or father or sisters, and went off to work.
I also found I could not walk without difficulty, nor could I adequately hold the milk bottles or crates. Later I was told I had dropped milk bottles all over the area around the dairy, completely oblivious. I was thinking all the time that soon I would be alright and back to normal, I just have to wake up properly, as you do when these things happen.
When the milkman arrived, I had opened the dairy for him. He later told me he beat me up as he thought I had dropped all the bottles deliberately, but then after seeing something was clearly wrong, he phoned my home. My parents phoned the doctor. When we reached my home, I was seen immediately by the doctor, then I was taken by my dad, straight off to hospital, Blackpool Victoria.
The hospital told my parents that things did not look good for me. However I was young. I was in hospital for twelve days, during which time I had a lumbar puncture, an invasive procedure where a needle is inserted into the base of the spine and fluid is taken and inspected to see if it contained any blood, I was lucky there was none in mine, it was clear. Every day I improved a little.
A few weeks after being released to home, I went to another hospital in Preston and had an angiogram, which was, I think, considered quite a risky procedure, but I survived, although when I woke up in a side ward, there were two other trolleys containing shrouded corpses; I almost thought I was dead too. That was that. Apart from one or two out patients follow up appointments, that was the last time I saw a doctor about my stroke.
Four weeks later I was back at school. I bombed my first year of A level, I found it hard to work and concentrate in the same way I had previously found relatively easy. It was quite difficult to understand the changes and why my faculties were not up to scratch as before. As a result I left school at fifteen.
However after a few years of unskilled labouring jobs, including one in a concrete factory, I managed to do my A-levels, and obtained a university degree in Sociology and Political Economy. In 1996 I managed to obtain an MSc in IT.
I have just finished 30 years as a teacher, and retired in August 2011. The only problems I have is that sometimes my balance goes a little bit awry. Although life continued as normal, as far as I can guess, after I went back to school, in 1966, it never had the same clarity as before the stroke. I also lost my optimistic outlook, and feel that somehow I was less than previously.
I think about what happened more or less every day, and often wonder what life would have been like without the stroke. Teaching would never have been my choice of life, but you have to make a living somehow.
For the past ten years I have had my blood tested twice a year, and my blood pressure is monitored by myself and the surgery. I take statins for cholesterol, and also some tablets for blood pressure.
To keep myself fit, I swim 30/40 lengths every morning and cycle at least 5 miles a day, possibly more than I would have if I had not had the stroke. However the emotional scars are large. Only in the last few years have I come to realise the devastation I felt when I had the stroke, lost control, and became very much a victim. For a young (or old ) person it is very frightening when your motor control goes. It's the fear of recurrence of the loss of control that compels me to swim all these lengths in the swimming pool and cycle all those miles on the bicycle.
I just wanted to say that nowadays, the medical help available for stroke victims is far better than 40 years ago, and think that the prognosis for survivors is much improved.
Roger Carberry
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