Andrew’s stroke happened in the early hours of Sunday 19th April 2020. In hindsight, we may have picked up on some dizzy spells that started a couple of days before. We were in the very early days of the pandemic and had been in lockdown for some 4 weeks - in short, Andrew collapsed and I immediately engaged ambulance services who whisked him away.
Very scary times for us both as I felt like I handed him over to an already panic stricken NHS and had no idea when we might be reunited. Thankfully I was able to bring him home on the 24th April with a promise of regular Occupational Health support. We were sent a number of documents to review with a lengthy list of exercises to complete. This in itself was fine but we were a bit in the dark with this thing called ‘fatigue’ – we enjoyed the ‘boom’ days and suffered the ‘bust’ days.
To keep it brief, his stroke had affected him down the left side, a very shaky arm, weak leg and slurred speech all of which were more pronounced when Andrew was tired. We had telephone support about every 9 days and 2 very brief visits, the rest was up to us. We decided to search for private support/care and initially met with Taher via Zoom on 17th June, swiftly followed by a face to face appointment a week later. It’s worth noting that we are not local but have been more than happy to travel the 106 mile round trip.
The improvement was immediate and from memory we initially attended weekly but moved to fortnightly to enable Andrew to put into practice what he learned and gradually moved to ad hoc as needed. Weekly Neurofit classes have been invaluable.
The transformation has been amazing – Taher has listened to every symptom we describe and adapted each session to address our concerns. I think the dance video is evidence of the progress to date and couldn’t have been achieved without Taher and the tools/resources he has at his disposal with PhysioFunction.
