Transcription:
Bill Gasiamis 0:00
Good day there! Bill from recoveryafterstroke.com. Recently I received a message from one of the people on the Facebook group recovery after stroke.
And the question was whether or not I made a full recovery and what affirmations are used daily to help me in my recovery. So, Erica, the answer to your first question about whether I made a full recovery is that I’ve made a full recovery in that I won’t be experiencing a bleed in the brain again anytime soon. And that’s because they removed the faulty blood vessel during surgery and resolve that issue.
Bill Gasiamis 0:47
Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, what happened during surgery is that they actually interfered with one of the blood vessels or part of the brain structure around that blood vessel when they took that blood vessel out and stopped it from rupturing.
Bill Gasiamis 1:07
And as a result of that, it caused some permanent numbness on my left side. So my hand and my leg and my entire body from the middle to that side is completely numb. And when I say completely numb, it’s numb but it has strange sensations it has feeling it has feeling like cold, I feel the cold a lot more. And it has feeling like tingly and has a whole bunch of different strange burning and cold and all bizarre feelings all the time.
Bill Gasiamis 1:44
And when I get tired, I get less and less sensation in thea arm and in the leg. And the way I’ll walk is affected a little bit. And also the way that I can hold on to things and grip tight with my left hand is affected a little bit even though I have that I consider myself having fully recovered. And that’s because it’s taken seven years to get to this point.
Bill Gasiamis 2:10
And I’ve learned to live with the difference on my left side, it doesn’t impact me on a day to day basis other than when I’m really tired. And that is just a great sign that I’m tired, and I should stop doing what I’m doing. And I should start taking care of myself and doing less, because one of my biggest problems before stroke was that I did way too much for way too long.
Bill Gasiamis 2:32
And I stressed myself out and I didn’t do enough self care. So I have this real great tool, this real mechanism now that tells me to do more self care. Now, as far as the affirmations that I said to myself, I’m a very positive person as it is. I trained myself to not pay attention to negative comments about how I’m going and that when people ask me, How are you and when they sent me the negative vibes or the negative energy because they don’t know how to be positive.
Bill Gasiamis 3:05
I just reflected that back and let them say what they had to say and didn’t take it to heart and didn’t worry about the comments that they made that were negative without meaning. So that’s one of the things that I did. I also did a lot of coaching. I had an opportunity to connect with some amazing coaches because I am a coach myself, and I work in an amazing community with a lot of coaches.
Bill Gasiamis 3:35
I worked with coaches regularly to continue reframing my experience from something negative to something positive. So I was doing a lot of gratitude type of work. What am I grateful for? What does this mean that is amazing. What have I learned from this that I can share with other people to help them so I did a lot of great gratitude work.
Bill Gasiamis 4:00
And I’m grateful for almost every experience that I have in life. Now. I’m not saying that I enjoy having bad experiences, but I enjoy the part after the bad experience, and I really get a lot out of being grateful. So that’s another one of the things that I practiced. I also did a lot of meditation. And I practiced meditation on a daily basis and still do whenever I feel stressed, or whenever I need to just reconnect with my internal body with the part of my body that’s not in my head.
Bill Gasiamis 4:35
It’s my head that caught me in trouble. And I found that connected to the body really helps support recovery. So I did a lot of that. Meditation is also something that you can do, and imagine yourself achieving great things and great goals. Even though you can’t walk yet or you can’t use your arm. We can still fire off the same pathways in the head by imagining that we’re doing something that we want to do.
Bill Gasiamis 5:04
We fire those great pathways off in the same way as if we were actually doing that task. So that helps to get a foothold on recovery before you’ve actually had the opportunity to do a recovery exercise, for example. So I did a lot of meditation and a lot of imagining myself doing the things that I wanted to do.
Bill Gasiamis 5:26
So that’s another thing that I did. I also did a lot of work around learning, which I share with stroke survivors now in my podcast, and also share inside the forum section of my website, where people can come and have a conversation and learn about different things. I did a lot of re understanding of the foods that I needed to either begin eating or stop eating. And that was a really big change for me in my life. It just made a complete difference to my fatigue levels, it made a complete difference to the way I felt the energy that I experienced.
Bill Gasiamis 6:06
And it also made a massive difference in how my gut felt and how the bloating that I used to have went away. So that’s another thing I did. I continue to do these things on a daily basis. I’ve been practicing these things for seven years. I stopped smoking, I stopped drinking. And recently, I committed to stopping caffeine again after I had stopped for about four or five years drinking caffeinated beverages.
Bill Gasiamis 6:36
So that’s some of the things that I do. Erica, I hope that this information has been helpful. And if it is, let me know. And if there’s something that you need to ask me, whether it’s a question about your recovery, or how you’re feeling or anything at all whatsoever, please do get in touch. Oh, and one more thing. PS Just before I go, I did a lot of emotional Intelligence work I connected a lot with my heart.
Bill Gasiamis 7:03
stroke survivors talk about how they become overwhelmed how they experience a lot of emotional discomfort or a lot of highs and lows, really big emotional outbursts and really low emotional feelings. So I did a lot of emotional work and I coach people to reconnect with their heart and to reconnect with their gut.
Bill Gasiamis 7:27
Before this 10 minute, little discussion that I’m having with you goes out earlier today I did an interview about that topic. So look out for that interview, subscribe to the podcast, leave us a review, send us a like, do a share. And you will be able to get in touch with me via those Facebook or Instagram or via the podcast at anytime. Just please feel free to get in touch and also, you’ll be able to if you come aboard, and check out my podcast and subscribe to.
Bill Gasiamis 8:00
You’ll be able to get all of the interviews that I do with all the amazing people where I share their amazing stories, and I share some of the things that I did that helped me in my recovery. I’m wishing you well, I hope that this has answered your questions. Thanks so much for asking. And thanks everybody else who asks questions by email, via direct message that sends me messages I really appreciate it. I do this for you guys. So thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity.
