stroke – Caro Babbo

I’m changing

Port Townsend, 12-JUN-2023 – I’m changing. I think I’m changing back to whom I was; I am different. I know I feel the same things I used to feel, but I’m different.

Since the stroke, there have been changes in me. In the early days, the days would pass by without really an end to them. They were somehow continuous. Eventually, that stopped, but even now days don’t have the strong breaks that they used to. I seem to sleep heavier.

One, Two, Three Strokes, you’re out at the ol’ ball game.

Port Townsend, WA, 8-May-2023 – Today feels like it is the end of the day that happened. But it’s not. That day was six days ago.

I remember sleeping much closer to Jennifer than I normally did, she was comfortable and quite warm. She had her hand on me, across my shoulders, then it felt a little uncomfortable. I also felt I needed to go to the bathroom.

Jennifer’d been gone for days, and I had been gone for weeks prior to that, so we hadn’t seen each other much in the last two months. It was nice to have her near, and very comforting that she should put her arm around me when she was sleeping. I scooted over leftward to the edge of the bed. She must’ve been closer than I thought because I could still feel her hand on me.

Locked In

Rocky Point, NY, 5-DEC-2019 – On a nondescript day in March, 1977, my mother drove towards McCarrick’s Dairy, the local convenience store, three blocks away. As she crossed Prince Road a car on her right ran the stop sign pushing her car into a LILCO light pole that was so far into the road way that the paving crew paved on both sides of the pole.

The impact of the car hitting the pole, together with the twisting force of the car on her right, caused her head to hit the “A” pillar between the windshield and the car door. She severed her spinal cord at ‘‘C4’’, the fourth cervical vertebrae. She was a quadriplegic for thirty-one years.