A DOSE OF REALITY IN AUSTIN

By Juan Montoya
After a city commission campaign that everyone agrees dragged out for too long, I agreed to accompany my mother, sisters and niece for a a visit to my younger brother – in his 40s – who's recovering from  a stroke.
So this Mother Day's weekend we headed out to see him and see how he was doing.
Anyone who's had a relative suffer one of these horrific things knows what I'm talking about. If the kin was far from home when they succumbed to the derrame, one is not prepared to encounter the effects of the malady on his kin.
My brother worked as a personal trainer, and enjoyed long-distance running. In fact, when he first felt chest pains he was training for a Thanksgiving Day charity marathon in Austin. It was not the first and certainly no one thought it would be the last.
When his significant other took him to the hospital, tests showed he had a slight blockage in one of his arteries and they gave him blood thinners to facilitate the angioplasty maneuver they were going to use to clean it out. However, things didn't work out that neatly. During the waiting period for the thinners to work, doctors felt that his worsening condition warranted starting an emergency intervention and they did.
Unbeknownst to them, a speck of plaque had worked its way through his heart and into a blood vessel in his brain. It created a clot  and for the better part of 15 minutes the clot stopped oxygen-carrying blood  from entering his brain.
It was a miracle he didn't die on the table.
The upshot of the event was that suddenly, a healthy human being with a working intellect found himself trapped inside  a body where the most basic motor skills would not respond. He could not swallow. He had no control of his eyes or eyelids. Even his vision was impacted, with therapists saying that he had double vision and saw two each of us when we first visited him soon after the horrific event occurred.
The effect on those who knew him and could remember him before this ill befell him was immeasurable. You're used to seeing a healthy, energetic man in the flower of youth and now what confronts you is a confused, palsied human being peering out uncomprehendingly from a shell of his former self. You feel helpless standing there trying to make eye contact and wishing you could will him to react to the simplest handshake, hug, and even a simple display of love and affection like a kiss on the cheek. He is, after all, your little brother, and in this culture, the eldest is his brother's keeper.
It shakes you up a bit.
It had been some six months since my brother suffered his stroke when we arrived in Austin. He was at home now after spending months of intense rehabilitation in the hospital. If you listed closely, you could make now out words, as he formed out sentences. He could eat solid food and if he worked at it, he would remember to clear this throat of saliva before he spoke so he didn't choke. He, in effect, was relearning how to control his body all over again.
He had learned American Sign Language before his stroke, and it was his signing with his hands even before he could enunciate words that alerted us – one of my sisters lives in Austin and works as an Asst. Super with the ISD and learned it as well – that his intellect remained lively inside the troubled body.
In fact, he is now making strides on the parallel bars to take halting steps on his own and teases his mate and my sisters through his signs and vocal noises.
On Sunday we all decided to take a walk pushing along his wheelchair to a nearby park in the suburbs of Austin. The rains we got in the Valley over the weekend had passed to Austin Saturday morning. It was a glorious day, the sky is a deep blue, the sunshine bright and the live oak and pecan trees a vivid green, almost shiny. It was the kind of day that makes you want to sing, and we, being a vocal bunch, launched into some old tunes like Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now", Hank Williams' "Your Cheating Heart," and even The Beatles "Don't Let Me Down." By the time we were getting back to the house he was audibly keeping up with us on the songs and nodding a rhythm.
It'll be a long road back to normalcy for my little brother. To relearn all that it took the rest of us a lifetime to control and which we take for granted will not be easy. But in the greater scope of things, his progress dwarfs what now suddenly seem like mundane and egotistical banalities in the universe of the Internet and the blogosphere.