An Open Thank-you Letter to Notre Dame

On September 12th 2014 my life changed; I had a massive stroke while attending our staff meeting at the beginning of the school year. Thanks to a few staff members who were very well prepared in health and safety, they knew that I was having a stroke, and called 911. I was rushed to Trillium Hospital where they confirmed what our health and safety experts on staff suspected was happening to me; i was having a massive stroke.

I had to stay at Trillium for a month. The doctors told me that the left side of my body was paralyzed and that is when the work began trying to sit up straight without help and trying to stand up on my own and take my first step, which was one of the scariest things I had done in a long time.

Since my entire left side was paralyzed I had no sense of where it was in space therefore making it hard to balance. I basically had to put my full trust in my rehab therapists that they would catch me if I lost my balance and fell. Taking that first step needed a lot of encouragement and motivation and so I visualized walking into my classroom and standing in front of my students. That has been my number one motivation for the past nine months as I go through my physical therapy which at times is painful, tiring and scary. Along with picturing my classroom and my students another very important support system have been the prayers and get well messages/cards I have received from staff and students. These have meant the world to me especially on those days when I just wanted the nightmare to end and I want to go back to the way life was.

An average healthy 36 year old starting out in her career and being blessed to have found a job that really doesn’t feel like work at all instead absolute pleasure joking with my students in class and fun banter with the ladies I get to share my “office closet” with. I miss it all so much. Being away for almost a year has been very difficult; however, I guess the teacher in me keeps on thinking of how all of this can be transferred into a lesson for the equity class or IB Theory of Knowledge. I have gone from being an able bodied person to a person with a disability, confined to a wheelchair, but now walking proudly with a cane. My next step over the summer is to work on getting my left arm to hopefully also recover from the effects of my massive stroke; I will then march into Notre Dame in 2015-2016 ready to be part of that great community again.

Trillium… day ????

face is still very paralyzed from massive stroke

standing for the first time!!!

in Trillium, fi was with me

Trillium

one of my first days