I am trying to write something that will help you make a difference AS you are reading it. Maybe you are planning ahead for a stroke you think may come. You have plenty of time to read and integrate the ideas. However, if you were like me, you did not plan for a stroke in the family, nor did you think there was anything you could do about it if it did happen. I want you to know that I think there is plenty you can do. You can begin as soon as possible after the stroke occurs and continue throughout the occupational, speech and physical therapies your loved one will undoubtedly need. I did check with a doctor about the things I was planning on doing with my mom and was told it sounded good and certainly couldn't hurt. “Couldn't hurt” is quite a good recommendation from the medical establishment, I think.

Remember... that the person you love who might look gone... is still in there. They have the experiences and ideas and learning that they had before the stroke. Your job is to help create new pathways in the brain to access as many of those those skills and information as possible. I know that we were lucky with my mother’s stroke. In some ways she is better emotionally now than she was before the stroke but that has taken time. She wasn’t that way when she was first hospitalized.
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I began to work and play with her in the intensive care unit well before she was getting formal therapy. Other stroke patients were just lying there and their family members sitting helplessly by the beds. We will never know if that early intervention made a difference in her overall recovery. Many medical care folks and family members involved think it did.  A woman sitting by her husband was watching me with my mother... getting her to touch her sewing supplies, her yarn and knitting needles.  Later she spoke to me about it. I suggested she bring things for her husband to hold that had meaning for him: tools, favorite hobby items. 

The research we found stated that the earlier the interventions the better, but that is not what actually happened in the intensive care stroke unit. She was watched. She was kept alive with fluids and drugs. She was monitored. She was not given intervention or therapy. That did not happen until she went to a rehabilitation center a week later. Even then, she went on a Friday and no therapy was given until the following Monday. So the only therapy she was given for the week after her stroke occurred was the therapy I was making up as I went.

I would assume this lack of early treatment was typical of most stroke patients at that time. Hopefully things have changed. Whether it has or not, this is about what you can do until the formal prescribed therapy starts. It is also about how to continue and evolve what you do during the time in between the professional therapy sessions. Those sessions amount to only a few hours of the week. Think about all that other time you have to create experiences and healthy pathways for your loved one.