Monday, December 17, 2012

Survivor Story - Robert Hutcheson Stroke in July 2001

I want to offer an apology to those of you who visited here Monday and read the Black Hills story by Chuck Hofvander and now find it replaced with this one. If it looked familiar to you, yesterday's blog about Black Hills was a duplicate of one I posted last October. Not sure how that slipped by me. The one below about Robert Hutcheson  is the one intended. However, if you missed the Black Hills story and still want to read it, click on the October link under Blog Archive at the right of your screen and you'll find the story under that.   


by Chuck Hofvander

Robert Hutcheson  Stroke in July 2001

The normal process was: Get up, walk down the hall, go into the bathroom, do whatever was needed and repeat the same thing in reverse. But in July 0f 2001 things were not normal. Bob got up, walk down the hall, got into the bathroom and passed out. Passed out? Stop, something must be wrong with this picture.

Bob recalls falling, trying to get up, failing again but nothing after that. His wife came into the bathroom to see what was wrong and, for some reason, she knew right away Bob had suffered a stroke even though as Bob says “she doesn’t have a doctor’s degree.”

From this point on until three weeks later Bob has only intermittent moments of memory. His wife called their son and they drove Bob to the hospital. On their way there, his speech recovering for a few moments, he asked his son “how fast are we going” and his son responded “don’t worry about it Dad, I don’t have a drivers license anyway.”

They airlifted him to St. Anthony’s hospital in Rockford and then after one week they transferred Bob to Rockford Memorial.  His wife tells him that he could not sit, stand, walk, or carry on a conversation but he has no memory of what happened during those three weeks; after Bob recovered his memory his wife said he used that to ignore her.

He soon recovered his memory Bob was sure after three years he would be like he was “like recovering from a cold”.  He said to himself “Don’t get happy here your ass is going to beat this”.  He was so sure that he’d beat stroke he signed a three lease on a farm. But he soon realized that was his life now.

Before the stroke Bob had a positive attitude toward life and it continued after the stroke. Bob says “life goes on and things are different today and they will be different tomorrow, you have to adjust to it.” Bob goes on to say “Be yourself and try to make things better going forward.”
Great advice for us all to live by.    

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