Learning to write again

Although I'd lost my fine motor skills and any strength in my right arm I didn't really know what this would mean on what I'd have to undertake within my recovery.

When I'd regained enough strength to fight gravity, and worked to recover my ability on picking up and holding a pen I initially tried to write. Wow this was a big shock, I couldn't!

I'll explain what I mean by that. Well due to the impact of one stroke my motor skills were affected, this meant that I couldn't initially move my fingers, hand and arm, this was my major motor skills. Little did I know was that the same happened to my fine motor skills, I couldn't undertake small movements or move the small muscles quickly. Also I was unable to apply constant pressure, my muscles couldn't undertake this sort of workout and would work extremely sporadically. This meant I was unable to draw a straight line and I was unable to draw short distances, full stops, commas, speech marks. These were just too difficult.

I'd learned in my earlier years the typing of one sentence to prove all the letters of a mechanical keyboard worked correctly (Seriously I'm not that old), so I used this to write my first sentence, as it would use all the letters of the alphabet; this sentence is:

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"

It was around around 5 weeks before I wrote this sentence for the first time. I managed to complete it, stopping on numerous occasions, Sizing and spacing were all over the place, I wrote each letter separately, every line was jagged and it took me approx 2 minutes 30 seconds. I was writing like a 4 year old hat new their alphabet, but slower.

I kept up the tracing, keeping the sheet and dating it. I was noticing an improvement but also noticed that if I didn't practice things weren't miraculously going to fix itself. We put a timetable together which was my job, my job being to work at my recovery. I sat down and wrote for approx an 30 mins to an hour a day, Monday through Friday.

My controls improved immensely and I then tried to do joined up writing. This was a real shock as I again couldn't! I'd forgotten haw to join letters together. I'd asked my daughter to get me some basic writing books. The sort that are used if you want to help your kid at home. I used these to try and fix my ability of joining these letters and continued to work my way through these books.

After 2 months I'd recovered enough to think about looking for a job, it was January 2011 and I was really ashamed of my handwriting. I could write legibly but this was slow, untidy and looked like it had been produced by a child.

It's now June 2011, my writing is still slow, slightly more improved but there is one major exception: I'm no longer ashamed.