Hi Darling Ones,

How goes it?

My eyes have been extra garbage lately which makes writing harder than normal. In fact, I’m dictating this to my iPhone, which makes me feel kind of stupid because I’m talking to an empty room, which is not my jam. I’ll never be one of those posting video of myself spouting pithy remarks while looking into my phone’s camera. So thank your lucky stars for that.

So here I am talking to my phone like a complete doofus.

If you look at the picture above, you can see me giving the bird to an empty room while wearing a black wrist weight. My occupational therapist has decided we’re going to try trickery as a therapeutic tool.

She wants to see if my brain will recognize when my arm is actually heavier (with the weight) and stop thinking it’s heavy all the damn time. This week I did all my OT exercises with the weight on. When I told her I had one at home, she told me to wear if a day to see if it makes a difference,

Since we’re going to be wrapping up my occupational therapy soon, I joke with myself this is a last ditch effort. I’m both bummed and eager to end occupational therapy.

The irrational parts of me are still, “I’m not ready. I AM STILL BROKEN!”

And the smaller, quieter rational parts of me totally get it. As are as the functionality of my Floppy Scoop goes, I’m as good as I’m going to get. I have all the average strength of a woman my age. I have the normal reaction times of a woman my age who didn’t have a stroke. Even with the tremor my fine motor skills are good, and a lot go my hand-eye coordination is poor because of the retinopathy/macular edema (which is not stroke related).

Basically, my brain’s a jerk. Last week my occupational therapist and I had a long discussion about how long it takes to build new neural pathways once part of your brain has died.

While I knew I had brain damage, I didn’t thnk about it as part of my brain dying. When she said that, I was like oh my God, part of my brain died! Then I went on long rant about how pissed I was that I never did drugs. I totally ate up that “this is your brain on drugs” commercial and I was very worried about harming my brain because I knew that being smart was my way out of poverty (and while I’m broke again, I’m not as poor as I’ve been).

All those years protecting that motherfucker and it turned on me anyway. So rude. There was probably a lot of cocaine I could’ve done. Kidding. I wouldn’t do cocaine ever because of Regina Morrow in Sweet Valley High. I know if I ever did cocaine once, just one little time I’d probably die. But yeah, I’m still a little pissed at my brain for continuing jerkiness despite my “drug free is the way to be” lifestyle.

Cleanly & crankily yours,
Jodi

P.S. the way I talk or at least the way the phone interprets me talking. It starts this letter with “Hi darling worms,” which I find amusing.