Category: Salisbury Stroke Support Group

Fandango’s Friday Flashback – 27 September 2019

Well, it is Friday lunchtime once again, and I’ve had quite a productive morning. Diem, my Diabetes web site – in nearing completion. But more on that later…

I saw in my Inbox a notification from my WordPress friend Fandango. Every Friday, he posts a “Flashback” post, something that he posted on this day in a previous year. The intention is just to give the reader an idea of what he was up to back then.

So, I follow suit. Rather than just reblogging my old post, I wanted to provide a short commentary, complete with links and formatting, and I haven’t worked out if I can do that yet with WordPress’s “reblog” button.

Earlier on in my recovery, I used to be involved with other stroke survivors in a peer support group. It was a very informal affair – we met in a certain coffee shop at a certain time, and just caught up with each other for a few hours.

Peer support is a big deal. When you first come out of hospital, you can’t be bothered with things like computers and you don’t have the strength to get out, so you just sit there in the chair all day, thinking “I’m the only guy who ever went through this”. And you gradually get your head straight enough to use a computer, and your body strong enough to leave the house, and lo-and-behold you realise you’re not alone. That other people have gone before you.

That’s why peer support is a big deal. You’re meeting people precisely because they’ve had the same experience as you.

Our group was very laissez-faire. You either turned up, or you didn’t. I was somebody who did turn up because I think it is important to be consistent. But this state of affairs meant that several times, I turned up on my own. Even getting to this coffee shop was a five-hour roundtrip for me, and if I was going to spend that time sitting on my own… well, I can think of better things to do.

I don’t want to re-gurgitate the original post in my commentary. Plus, there are other posts in the blog which tell more of the story (same category), if anybody is interested. Suffice it to say that I stopped going a year ago. The group presumably folded. I have the contact details of a couple of the guys who went occasionally, but I’m not really in contact. Sad, but people move on. They moved on. I moved on.

The “better thing I could be doing” is developing my own software, which brings me full circle. With one product released, and another almost there, I guess you could say it has worked out okay. And, I still meet with other stroke survivors, by virtue of the charity work I do at the hospital. If one of them sees me, and thinks “I’m not the only guy…”, then it is worthwhile.

With all this in mind, I hope you enjoy the post.

https://strokesurvivor.me.uk/2018/09/27/end-of-an-era/

What’s in a name?

I smile sometimes at the names of some stroke support groups. Not being critical – but I think you make a choice between punchy and ambiguous, and between precise and a mouthful. I never really managed to get a happy medium.

For example, around here the groups include the Onward Club and The Forward Club. Now, please don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticising either of these groups or their names. Onward and Forward – those are directions in which we all want to move, surely?

In that, though, lies the rub. Unfortunately, neither name conveys anything about stroke without further digging.

I must admit when I struggled with this problem myself, I jumped the other way. Salisbury Stroke Support Group. The plus is that it described the nature of the group quite well. We should probably have had the word “peer” in there somewhere too. But all this has a minus, basically the name was a total mouthful, “peer” or not. Imagine typing all that into a web browser, say.

Our name was christened when the local coordinator for the stroke charity offered to get some flyers printed. In the end, that never happened, but it set us thinking. If we got the flyers printed, they would need to conform to an existing template. But at the time, we had nothing, so I thought “so what”. It didn’t stop other people criticising the template, but, in the end it boiled down to whether we wanted the leaflets or not.

The template required us to think of a name for the group. From experience, thinking up the name is the hardest part of any project! I was at a loss, although I did think we should have a name which went some way to conveying what we were. I was guided by a friend of mine, who was involved in a support group over in Essex. Harlow Stroke Support Group. If it could work in Harlow, why not Salisbury?

So, Salisbury Stroke Support Group was my suggestion. I took this to the group and it was agreed although with little interest. If we talked about the group previously, it was just to refer to it as the “Playhouse coffee group” or something. I didn’t think we could use that as a title, so argued against it in favour of something else. No arguments.

In the end, the leaflet offer fell through, but the cost of a few leaflets was so trivial that I ploughed on and designed something myself. I was lucky in that, being computer-literate, I was familiar with how to approach such a task. It took a bit of time, but not much. But, of course if you come up with any kind of flyer, you need to call yourself something, so I stuck with the name.

Anyway, that was the history. Somebody did criticise the name later, but I just told they that changing the name would be fine by me, but if they wanted to print leaflets, they’d need to pay for that. And I’d happily tweak the web site, but they’d need to pay for renting a new domain name. Never heard another peep. But, of course, we ended up with a mouthful. I wonder if things might have been different, if we’d adopted a punchy name?

End of an era

Well, not quite, but I’ve decided to place some other commitments over my Wednesday afternoon peer support group, Salisbury Stroke Support Group. In truth, the attendances have not been brilliant for a while, and yesterday I turned up and was on my own (again). I actually took my wife with me yesterday, so strictly speaking, I wasn’t on my own, I just mean that no-one else turned up. And, at least I got a lift home afterwards, so I didn’t have to hang around for the bus. But the two of us spent half an hour just chatting to each other, something we could easily have done at home any day of the week.

It’s good, I suppose, that people feel they have recovered to the point where they don’t think it is useful to come along to the group any more, but at the same time a little sad. Moreso really because I think of it all as a bunch of mates getting together rather than just peer support. And, of course, there is the perennial question, “what if someone new needs support.?” There are precious few avenues as it is, and we’ve just closed off one of them.

Certainly, whilst I’m not working, I had a very straightforward view that I had nothing better to do than to go into Salisbury every couple of weeks, so I was happy to go along. By that I mean that there was always other stuff to do, but generally these days I don’t have to be in a certain place at a certain time, so I was happy to go to the group. But, really, if I’m going to go along – leaving the house at midday and not getting back until 5pm – and sit there on my own, there are far better things that I can be getting on with. I may even end up going into Salisbury anyway, but at least I won’t be constrained by meeting times.