Exactly Half
By: Victoria Ponte
Tags: Travel, Disability, Gratitude, This Happened To Me, Stroke

Edgar Perez for Unsplash

Exactly Half

What I realized when I saw a disturbing photograph

The effects from a stroke usually last forever. It’s been 21 years since I woke up paralyzed on the left side of my body when I was pregnant.

Spoiler alert: the baby turns 21 this April.

Following brain surgery to clean up the hemorrhage that would have killed me if left untreated, the entire left side of my body was completely paralyzed.

During the 53 days I lied in bed in the acute care hospital, pregnant and paralyzed, some movement began to return.

I focused on my fingers intensely and gradually could wiggle them. They were clenched in a fist and my arm was bent and pressing firmly on my big belly. I could pull it away and unfold my fingers with my right hand.

The physical therapists were insistent that I get up and try to walk because I was only 35 and early intervention is critical to stroke recovery. It was scary for everyone because I was pregnant which is not what they were used to working with.

They braced my lifeless left foot and followed me closely as I hobbled around the halls. I couldn’t be admitted to a rehab hospital because they weren’t equipped to deal with a pregnancy.

Through some miracle I gave birth in the usual way while I was still hemiplegic 6 weeks before the baby was due.

I was moved to a rehabilitation hospital after the birth for intensive physical, occupational and speech therapy while my 2 year old son was home with his father, and the baby stayed with my parents.

For six weeks, I learned how to walk and take care of myself. My thinking was affected in that I had trouble with executive functioning so we worked on that, too.

During that time, I struggled with depression that was caused by being postpartum, organic damage to my brain, and shitty life circumstances.

Movement slowly returned, but it was spastic and painful. I was grateful to be able to walk at all.

Returning home was a nightmare of an adjustment. It seemed the world had been rearranged in the three months I was in hospitals.

I used a wheelchair at first. We lived in a two story house and my balance was poor. I continued going to outpatient physical therapy for months after my release from the rehab hospital to improve my walking and strength.

It was a slow, painful uphill climb over many years to return to some semblance of a “normal” life.

After the first year of recovery, my psychiatrist recommended therapeutic horseback riding as an activity to replace the many sports I could no longer participate in. It was also psychologically helpful in treating the depression.

It’s a process that continues to this day, 21 years later.

I’ve been extremely fortunate to have been able to live my life to the fullest for so many years. I have won 19 ribbons in horse shows since I started to compete in 2014.

I figured out how to continue traveling with my disability. Since I had the stroke in 1999, I have visited Kenya, Costa Rica, Mexico, Switzerland, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the Canadian Rockies.

It was on a recent trip to San Francisco to visit my brother when I noticed how odd my face looked in a photograph. At first I couldn’t quite name what looked strange.

I studied the picture carefully and realized the left side of my face looked very different from the right. It was as if there was a line down the exact center of my face.

The right half was much more animated and the wrinkles were more pronounced due to the greater strength of the muscles there.

It was a bit startling to see this pronounced difference where I had been mostly unaware of the disparity in the strength of the muscles in my face for 21 years.

This jarring realization crystallized and highlighted the fact that I have built a great life with exactly half of my body working properly.