Karen Binns

Day 30 of Stride4Stroke. I have finished 1200 moving minutes for September. Today wasn't easy. I had 46 minutes to go and I have Covid for the first time. My body is fighting it so hard and I am exhausted. So walking and doing anything is very difficult today. I had a flashback to my first days home from hospital today as I leant on the side rails of the treadmill and walked at a super fast 1km/hr. Watching to check that my right foot is flat on the ground before I put any weight on it and making sure my right knee doesn't buckle. I had to walk 10 to 20 minutes at a time and then take a long break. 

Thanks to everyone who has sponsored me donating to the Stroke Foundation. And thank you for your encouragement and support, not just this month but over the last 5 years through recovery (or more recently to newer friends). Also thank you for your protection, remarkably this is the first time I have had covid to my knowledge. As predicted I am having a pretty severe reaction to it, but it would have been worse had I had it closer to the stroke. If you are able, there is still time to donate on my fundraising page. 

Stroke4Stroke Day 5: 5km Parkrun pb 33.15. Day 6: 7 minutes gym & a very slow 1.5km 32 minute recovery walk. Day 7: TBC (I still hurt). Total of 290 of 1200 moving minutes for the month. $168 of $1000 raised.

Also, you can tell if I don't write for a few days that I am tired. Words still come slowly and when fatigue sets in, they don't coke at all. I have to wait to write even small things like sms's. The impact of a stroke is sometimes invisible, but it is still there. During my Saturday parkrun, my mini pocket rocket was running alongside telling everyone I was going to get a pb (based on how long it takes him to complete the 5km from wherever we were on the course... he is now officially a sub 20 minute 5km runner, we are not in the same league - not due to stroke). A pb has a cost. Normally, when a person pushes themselves too hard, they get sore legs, puffed, high heart rate... and those sore tired legs stop you. For me, my brain gets tired, and I lose the feeling on my right side, and the ability to think. And so I think, I am actually feeling pretty good, not sore at all... and I increase effort. I only just worked this out. I had no idea why I felt like vomiting, and similar issues (organs not working) during the run, the run seemed so easy. But looking back, my heart rate max was 199 bpm, and the average 172bpm and that explains it... too high. This is something I will probably call the Strokeline about and get advice on if this theory makes sense, and how to manage sports now. Being able to just call and ask for advice on all sorts of things like this has been so helpful to me. 

Please consider donating: https://www.stride4stroke.org.au/s/11351/15760/s. Thanks!

Stroke4Stroke fundraiser for Stroke Foundation days 3: gym with the physio 30 minutes (he says I will be swimming fly in a month or 2) & day 4: was a whopper!!! 3.5km in 1 hour (rest time 30 minutes not included in my moving minutes. 1274 strokes (plus some kicking). Total of 218 of 1200 moving minutes for September. 

Today is Aveley parkrun at 8am (its free). Come and join me (if not today then sometime in September). PS with all the praise to Stroke Foundation... some has to be saved for parkrun Aveley who have watched me through my first non-completed attempts at shuffling a 5km, to running it, to being injured because I was so unfit, to today... which will be my first run attempt in months. 

I've already posted my stroke story. What happened next is while in the hospital, I was told that the faster I get back into things the more likely I was to be able to do them. Hubby very thoughtfully brought me the book I had been reading pre-stroke. A Charles Dickens. I would read one sentence over and over and over until I fell asleep from the effort. It didn't make sense. But they were words, and it helped me speak again. How art ye all today? Yep, somehow my first language was old english which isn't even what Charles Dickens wrote. So I begged the hospital staff for something else. They gave me piles of information on stroke (mum's this was equivalent to all the reading you get with a newborn baby). But the stand out was the information from the stroke foundation, laid out in easy to read format, simple words (they really know what is needed & provide it). So that is the first thing I actually could read and it helped me to speak, read and write again... plus informed me of my journey ahead which was a long one, still going, and there was a great big phone number for the Strokeline who ended up helping me with so much!!! Please consider a donation to them... maybe $11 because another stroke happens in Australia every 11 minutes... or pick one of my other stats.

https://www.stride4stroke.org.au/s/11351/15760/s. Thanks!

Day 2: 10 minutes of gym and a 5km walk  in 56 minutes. Maybe a swim tomorrow.

For those that don't know my story... in July 2021 I had a Covid vaccine. I had a mild allergic reaction slightly worse than the 1st vaccine. I was prepared for it though, took an antihistamine and went home. I had the aches and the headaches for a week like a lot of people seemed to have. I woke up at 6am a week later, walked around the bed, said good morning (or thought I did... apparently it was mumbo jumbo, the first sign). I went to the toilet, had some coordination issues (unravelled the whole roll of toilet paper)... I knew something was very very wrong, but everytime I tried to speak the wrong words came out. At this point my husband thought I was sleepwalking and tried to send me back to bed, my refusal was his first alarm bell. He called an ambulance, they asked me to smile and raise my arms... the smile felt perfectly normal to me (but was lopsided) but I could see one arm dropped. While waiting for the ambulance I tried communicating but had all the wrong words or a slur of mumbo jumbo made up words, I tried standing but couldn't, I tried writing but could only squiggle, I tried moving my arms and found everything was in mirror image. I found I was having problems breathing and swallowing too. I tried thinking words and couldn't even do that but kept trying until the first coherent thought came 'I love you God', I had meant to say 'help me God', I guess the Holy Spirit translated. I started improving from that point. The ambulance was 30 minutes from my house, and once it arrived it took 30 minutes to get me to the hospital. I was rushed in for a CT which showed nothing. And then a neurologist made a life saving decision... he decided that even though it wasn't showing on the CT, I had all the signs of stroke and they would give me blood thinner for it. An MRI the next day showed that I had had a major ischaemic stroke, part of the ongoing allergic reaction.