7 Things A Stroke Survivor Did Wrong In Preventing Stroke

If you ask me which part of being a stroke survivor is the scariest, I won’t say it’s the impact that you must deal with, whether it’s being paralyzed or the part where your world collapsed at the mention of stroke as your diagnosis result.

I know it’s pretty much scary for not able to do everything on your own again and to see your life collapsed before your eyes due to stroke, but honestly, for me, the scariest part of being a stroke survivor is knowing, all those above can happen again and again.  There’s almost no limitation on how many times you get a stroke attack.

At some point in your life now, you might think that I am not making any sense. The fact that you are now a stroke survivor didn't change the other fact that you are at greater risk of getting another stroke whether it's the second, third, fourth and so on.

Whether you just survived from a mini-stroke or a full stroke, you are at greater risk of getting another stroke as compared to others, as the time goes.

Is this not your first-time surviving a stroke attack, even after putting so much effort? Did you just anticipate having more stroke attack until it grabs the life from you? Maybe not.

Most likely you are preventing stroke wrongly. Because at the end of the day, the result is all that matter to you. Whether you will get back on the track or you will be ended up depressing over every single to major things around you.

It’s hard to maintain your motivation if you are feeling insecure from within, and hope without effort is as useless.

In every general health rules or rules of getting healthy, it starts with what you eat. 80% contribute to your general health is coming from your diet. While the other 20% could be coming from your exercise.

Not to be confused, diet never meant to let yourself starve. It simply means eating and drinking. Nowadays, there’s a lot more kind of diet than we ever known to exist.

Different part of the world has their own unique diet, whether it’s a Ketogenic diet, Mediterranean diet, Atkins diet, Vegetarian diet, Raw food diet or even an unhealthy diet, it is still a diet and the choices are yours.

Diet can be easy when you have more option to eat compared when you have more restriction on what not to eat. For an example, Atkins diet practitioner must restrict themselves from carbohydrates and the list can be extended till gluten free too.

​Meanwhile, Vegetarian diet practitioner must avoid meats of all kind and at the same point have to avoid garlic, onions, chives, and scallions too.

Then after a few weeks obediently following the diet, you start to wonder if the diet is working. Frankly, if you have a doubt over it and your body seems not to enjoy or feel good about the change in your diet, you are doing it wrong or perhaps, you are following the wrong diet.

When it comes to food, it is easier to know whether it’s good for you or not as compared to an exercise. If your body isn’t happy with it, it’s simply not the right diet for you.

Unfortunately for a survivor, some diet just won’t work on them just like how it works with others. Hence, some survivor can’t benefit fully from the diet plan they follow.

On top of difficult diet, some food just isn’t as stable or more nutrient dense and can easily react with your medication negatively. Adding salt to the wound, survivor who suffers from eating disorder like metallic taste or loss of taste will only make the diet worse.

Therefore, it is crucial to know which diet is actually working for stroke survivors, and not to disappoint you, the diet plan for stroke survivors do exist.

Did you realize that after a routine of 5 days a week, 45 minutes to one-hour exercising, your body didn’t seem to show any result from your exercise?

Is it possible that your body ‘immunize’ from any exercise effects, now? Perhaps, no. The secret is, just like not one medicine can cure all, not one exercise can fix everything too.

Apparently, exercising an extra minute or even hour won’t work. The key is to do your exercise or get your routine right. What if all you actually need is the 30 minutes a day, and 4 days a week?

That’s what we call doing the right thing! Lesser time and more outcome. Stop torturing yourself with the mind of ‘no pain no gain’. If it doesn’t work from the start, not necessarily it will work later.

Here’s an example. While cardio exercise is good for your circulatory system, lungs, heart and also to lose weight, but it’s would not be good for your strength, coordination, preventing injury and flexibility.

That’s why cardio exercise alone won’t do the magic for you. Just because cardio makes you sweat, and good for your cardiovascular, doesn’t mean that all that you need.

You are recovering wrongly through exercise if you skipped functional training and assuming cardio exercise is enough, or the other way around. Functional exercise will help to train and strengthen your body to perform daily life activities.

Hence, it is good to prevent injury, while being beneficial for your strength, overall flexibility, core strength, and mobility. Just a nice combination to compliment your cardio exercise and boost the result.

On another resemblance, exercising is like a diet. You won’t get all the benefits you need from just one single food. Therefore, get to know the best combination for your exercise routine and kiss goodbye to ineffectiveness.

That’s being said, statin will only work for 1 out of 300 people being prescribed with a statin. This isn’t a bluff, yet it is a finding from researcher Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartband and acknowledged by the Bloomberg.com.

Imagine that 300 people take a statin for a year before someone is prevented from a heart attack, stroke, or other adverse events.

Worse come to worst, not only the medicines might not work for you, then comes the negative side effect. In the case of statin, what should your expectation risk exposure of getting a negative side effect? What could be the side effects of a statin?

Gastrointestinal distress, muscle and joint pain, difficulty in sleeping, drowsiness, and dizziness as well as a headache. Well, if that’s not enough side effects, remember a long-term intake of medicines will eventually damage your kidney. Well, now we are talking.

Honestly, side effects from statin occur in five percent of the patients. So, let’s do some maths and calculate your risk. Chance of lowering your cholesterol by taking a statin is 1 out of 300 people or 0.003%, while chances of getting a side effect are 15 out of 300 people or 5%.

Therefore, what makes you think that you are recovering stroke rightly by hanging on tightly to the 0.003% chances being cured compared to letting yourself 15 times more likely to be harmed by the medicine?

Think, before you commit your whole life as a stroke survivor to depends on the medicines. Always know your medicine before you consume them.

How many of you start taking supplements after experiencing a stroke attack?

This quite common that some of you might end up spending your money on just any supplements known that might be good for you. From Omega 3 pills to vitamin C tablets, then a protein shake, and the list just goes on and on as long as there’s an ad promoting it to you.

Then without you realize, you have becoming a marketing target that is promoting all sort of supplement from what you actually might need to just any overpriced supplement that did not work.

On top of that, if you think supplement won’t have any side effects, think again. Some of the common mistakes we do as well are impulsive buying.

You might hear it from someone else before that drinking isn’t all bad to your health.

They might or might not tell you that wine, for example, is good for reducing your cholesterol level, lowering your risk of getting a stroke and heart disease, or even reduce your risk of getting a diabetes type 2.

This can be credited to the healthy content of wine, the antioxidant. Surprisingly, wine shares almost the same benefits to drinking a beer.

We all know that anti-oxidant is basically good for your heart and immune system. Furthermore, what’s good for your heart is good for your brain unless you overdo it, or you are drinking it as a stroke survivor.

If no one has told you yet, alcohol is actually containing a blood thinning effect.  For someone who survives a stroke due to bleeding, alcohol might cause you to bleed further.

The fact alcohol may interfere with your medicine, require you to take a precaution, such as refraining yourself from drinking any alcoholic drink within 3 weeks after your stroke.

Excessive drinking will also increase your blood pressure; hence it will also increase your chances of getting another stroke. Drinking too much alcohol will also trigger another cause of stroke, which is atrial fibrillation or irregular heartbeat.

Therefore, if you are an alcohol addict and quit drinking is impossible for you, it is recommended for you to have at least 2 days free of alcohol in a week.

But how much alcohol is a safe consumption? Given healthy people limited to 2 drinks on any day, a survivor shouldn’t go anything near 2 drinks per day.

Alternatively, if you felt insecure, consult your doctor for advice on how much you can drink and when to start drinking again if only you can drink at all.

Sleeping could be the easiest thing to do for stroke recovery and for preventing stroke but commonly done wrong, willingly or unwillingly. It is so easy you can actually do it with an eye closed!

But jokes aside, getting quality sleep isn’t as easy it may sound like, and it is as important as any other things mentioned previously which include diet and exercise to help your stroke recovery and prevention.

Sleeping disorder is almost common even among healthy people and occurs in more than half of stroke survivors. Not giving attention to how long you sleep and how well you sleep is the next common mistake survivor do in their recovery and prevention of stroke.

Poor sleep will slow your recovery then lead to depression, fatigues, night-time falls and other memory problems.

Among other impacts of disruptive sleep is insomnia, and restless leg syndrome which also associated with slower recovery. You need more than efforts, time, and patience to recover from stroke and that includes rest.

A good night sleep helps you to support the brain ability to restructure and create new neural connections with the non-impacted brain area, hence allow you to re-learn your functions and movement.

However, not every survivor is lucky enough to be able to have a good night sleep again. Some survivor might even suffer from lethargic regardless how much sleep they get and this later turns into post-stroke fatigue.

While sleep can’t cure everything, it shouldn’t be taken for granted either. If you have a sleeping disorder that comes in the package with your stroke attack, get it cured. Sleep disorder is treatable.

In case you never do any of the above mentioned wrongly, probably the problem you haven’t move forward in your recovery and prevention of stroke is a lie with your inconsistency.

It is better to reinstate again that stroke recovery and prevention isn’t only about efforts, and time, it also involves being patience.

Some of the survivors willingly give up after trying any recovery regime for a while and decided that it just will never work for them. While the other, depression put them at their worst.

Being consistent isn’t as easy as how it is said as it took motivation and perseverance to stay in your mission. What even worse is, the fact that it’s easier to give up than to get motivated especially when things suddenly go wrong.

Imagine following a diet plan for a week then after a month passed thru and with all the restrictions and food repetition, your taste bud gone wild and start craving for all the thing you shouldn’t have. Then you lost your mind and get stress over your own diet.

Not long after, you are eating without any proper diet and at another time you tried another diet plan. Therefore, it almost impossible to know if your previous diet is good or will work for you, as you end it sooner.

The same goes for your routine exercise. What if you do exercise based on what you feel like doing, or when you feel like exercising. Because the best time to exercise is when you least feel like exercising.

As much as doing the right thing is vital, doing the right thing consistently will only lead you to a better ending.

…and also making the wrong decision

Foremost, aside from recovering and preventing stroke wrongly, another mistake you do in the first place is making a decision with a cloudy mind. Under pressure, we tend to make a decision without a thorough thinking.

Perhaps, there is nothing more as a stressful situation in life than to make a medical decision for yourself or your loved ones.

That’s being said, encourage your mind to make a decision based on a rational assessment of the facts and to never rush it. Come to the realization that your brain isn’t working at their best under a certain pressure and every stroke survivor experience is unique from one another. So, what you currently experience possibly not happens to the other stroke survivors.

Remember, it is important not to recover and prevent stroke wrongly as after each attack, it will only increase your chances of getting another stroke and worse come to worst it will only amplify the current impact you are suffering now and ultimately taken your precious life.

I found a fun and interesting way to have a faster stroke recovery and might as well help you to prevent second stroke attack.

Don't hesitate and read them from the link below.

Is There Still An Option To Prevent A Second Stroke?