20210106 : The Communication breakthrough

When they finally removed the trac tube, everyone was thrilled. Not that i wasnt happy, after all, we have all struggled for so long for it. Entire Mumbai circus was for it. 

While there are physiological benefits, it didnt do anything to me psychogically.

The real breakthrough has been being able to weild the phone and Whatsapp.

All the while there was so much crap going on in my brain , and i had no idea how to express it. It also gave me the strength to stay in the hospital... Now, i can eat all your heads even if i cant eat anything else....

I remember the days when it was look up for YES and look down for NO. That was hellish as most people didnt manage to frame closed ended questions, and most often the answer had to be a MAYBE...

Then, thanks to my good friend, came the morse code chart. It was a big step up. But the challenge was most people could not understand it and would turn into a guessing game.. i would get even more frustrated, drive anyone trying to help crazy , and finally give up.

After a while , i could point at the letters and play the same guessing game. It was better than before, but had its own challenges.. most folks were trying to guess ahead the word or sentence and get it wrong.. so i had to frame a sentence, with words which were easy to guess any remove all pronouns, prepositions, junction words, etc so it made sense even if grammatically haywire. Then the game could begin.

However, the letters were in 2 columns and top to bottom and most time would go in somehow instructing folks which column and whether to move the board up or down to point at the letter.. that drove everyone crazy im sure.

Next there were a bunch of regular tasks on another sheet, which lasted for a short while . It was very rudimentary and while it made few instructions easy, it boxed my communication to only a few things and i didnt enjoy that...

Next i had the idea of a printed qwerty keyboard. This was very important in many ways. I remember being stubborn and difficult with my wife and my good friend to get it done fast.

* I wanted to get to a common ground, where everyone knows which letter comes where

* I could not lift my elbow off the bed, but i could move horizontally and cover all letters

* Lastly i had to communicate pin nos and pwds. The morse code chart didnt have numbers or special characters. And try telling someone mixed case stuff without the shift key.. also i could indicate when word ends and next beging using the space bar...

I remember they had reprinted the keyboard to be bigger and clutter free. I was appalled and felt robbed. There was no shift key, no space bar, etc. I must have acted like a maniac till it was printed like before. Im sure they couldn't make out why i was acting like that....

I have to mention this, there was a physiotherapist, who headed the dept in Nimhans, who loved this idea of a printed keyboard, and told me they had rolled it our for many stroke patients in Nimhans and were working on improving it also.

However this was also challenging, people still had to stand beside me patiently and string together letters to words to sentences.. just when they would sit down, they had to come back for the next sentence. This was also when i was feeling most hopeless and my wife had to bear the brunt of my messages first thing in the morning . Most days i wouuld wake her up for my crap msgs.

This was also when we had just come home and i had to mainly communicate with the nurses. Boy, they they may have good hearts, but english is crazy. 

I had to deliberately misspell words so they understood. I also had to use words they understood. Ex, to switch off geyser, i had to say "heater off", etc

It was a struggle..

Definitely, Whatsapp has been the first real milestone...

Cheers