Читать книгу Edie Browne’s Cottage by the Sea: A heartwarming, hilarious romance read set in Cornwall! - Jane Linfoot - Страница 9

Four months later …

You could say this all started the day of the skydive. Like a lot of people, I’m obsessed with beginnings. It’s as if we have this need to look back and identify the exact moment where things began, as if fixing an exact point in time could help any. But there again, if I hadn’t broken up with Marcus, I seriously doubt I’d have done that jump, so possibly it began earlier, with the split. But there again, if I hadn’t got my new job, things with Marcus would never have kicked off as they did. So maybe it began with that. But whatever went on before, right now I’m on a journey I didn’t choose to make and didn’t anticipate either. And the rest of my life will only begin again when I get back to where I started.

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A hundred and twenty-nine days ago I had a stroke.

At the time no one else believed it either. The Tuesday after my skydive I was still giddy with adrenalin. But when I got into the Zinc Inc office in Bath where I work, my boss, Jake, had to carry my morning coffee and muffin fix to my desk because I had pins and needles in my right arm. By lunchtime I couldn’t feel my fingers enough to hold my apple turnover. When I told Jake I could see rainbow halos around his head he took me straight to A&E.

At first they thought I’d slept awkwardly, and sent me home. It took days for them to discover a clot had formed in a blood vessel in my neck, then moved to my brain where it was causing a blockage. The skydive I’d done a couple of days earlier wasn’t directly to blame. They can only think it happened when I wrenched my head around to wave to Bella. Or because I’d spent so long staring up at the sky before we set off. Or maybe when I fell over the champagne bucket.

I didn’t know then, but the brain has millions of tiny things whose name I can’t put my finger on now, all firing messages to different parts of your body. If the blood flow to an area of the brain stops, random bits of your body stop working too. And that’s what happened to me.

You’d think if science has come far enough to land rockets on Mars that doctors would know everything about how the human body works. But the brain is so complicated there is still a lot about it even doctors don’t understand.

There are some things I do know. I’m actually lucky because it could have been a lot worse. I’m walking and talking, and I couldn’t be any more thankful for that. The outlook for recovery is good – most young people who have strokes will return to the job they did before. And that’s the hope I’m hanging on to.

My stroke took things away from me. Right now I’m having trouble with words. I can’t read. My speaking lags way behind my thoughts, and a lot of words I knew before just aren’t there any more. My sensations are all messed up too. Some are heightened, but others have disappeared completely. And I did have a seizure at one point too, so – for now – I can’t drive.

The last four months I’ve grabbed every therapy and medication on offer; I’ve improved a lot, and now it’s over to me. My car’s in the garage at home. My boss, Jake, is paying me a tiny amount until I’m well enough to do my job again. So what I have to do is to find my way back to what I was, one day at a time. It might be slow, and I’ll need to be patient. But what I think is, if I can jump out of a plane I can pretty much do anything. So long as I put my mind to it, I’ll get there with this too. All I want is to go back to being the person I was before. And so now I’m going to Cornwall for a while – I can always remember the Cornwall bit – because it’s my best hope of getting my life back on track. Watch this space …