I don’t cry easily.  I am not bragging about this, I think a good emotional release of tears every now and then would be helpful.  I have a few tricks to help me cry when I think I need to. I definitely had a higher propensity to cry for a few months after my stroke.

I had strong feelings of guilt that I had done something or not done something to cause my stroke.  These feelings lasted for quite a while. This could be categorized under “changing thought process” but I thought it merited it’s own space.  

I am not prone to conspiracy theories, but that is what my thoughts amounted to.  I was certain that doctors were thinking I should have done this or that differently and I would not have ended up in the hospital.  They didn’t say anything to that effect or even that I should be doing certain things afterward that I didn’t do before. I confided in a nurse friend of mine and she said it was common to have those kinds of feelings and that she was certain that no doctor would have suggested that I should have done anything differently. She was not prone to lying as far as I knew, but I was pretty sure she was lying when she told me that.  The doctors and the nurses were in on it together, they were not going to tell me anything that would upset me more, or so I thought.

About 6 months after my surgery I was crying – I was emotional and there were tears in my eyes – to a doctor about how I was afraid that I had done this to myself and that I should have done something different. He said I should not play the “what if” game with myself, there are always what if I did/didn’t do that, which is not at all helpful. His words resonated with me like no others had. I believe it was the combination of time (6 months later), tears and logic. “What if” I had been able to cry, would I not have felt so bad for so long? I can’t say for sure and we will never know but I do think that time played a major factor.

The nurse said that these feelings were common.  Bad things happen to people all the time. We live in a fallen world, as soon as sin entered it bad things started to happen.  I am sure that the nurse was right, people feel fear and guilt about many things, playing the “what if” game just makes it worse and your focus should be on getting better not “what if”.