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Understanding Cognitive Fatigue After Stroke: Doug’s Journey to Doug 2.0
For many stroke survivors, the most challenging part of recovery isn’t always physical—it’s the mental exhaustion that follows them day after day. This deep, unshakable tiredness is known as cognitive fatigue, and it affects countless people who appear “fine” on the outside but are working incredibly hard behind the scenes just to function.
One stroke survivor who knows this all too well is Doug Mitchell.
What Is Cognitive Fatigue?
Cognitive fatigue is a kind of mental exhaustion that goes far beyond being “tired.” It affects your ability to think clearly, stay focused, solve problems, and complete everyday tasks. After a stroke, the brain works harder to reroute and compensate for damaged areas. Even simple activities like holding a conversation, reading a sentence, or planning a meal can feel like climbing a mountain.
Unlike physical fatigue, cognitive fatigue is invisible. It’s not something people can see—but you feel it deeply. And unfortunately, it’s often misunderstood by others who don’t know what it’s like to live with a brain that’s trying to heal.
Doug’s Story: The Invisible Stroke
Doug Mitchell lived with cognitive fatigue for two years before realizing what had happened to him. He went to the hospital thinking he might be having a heart attack, only to learn he’d had three strokes—and never knew it. The strokes were caused by a hole in his heart, and they impacted three areas of his brain, leaving him with 90% cognitive and 10% physical deficits.
Doug calls his experience an “invisible stroke” because, from the outside, he looked fine. But inside, his brain was struggling with memory, attention, task initiation, and mood regulation.
One of the hardest moments for Doug was undergoing a neuropsychological assessment. He thought he had aced the test. But the results showed he had lost his executive function—a term that includes abilities like decision-making, multitasking, and emotional regulation. These are exactly the areas impacted by cognitive fatigue.
The Power of Acceptance and Doug 2.0
For the first two years, Doug was in denial. He couldn’t believe he’d had a stroke. In his words:
“I’m a man. There’s no way I had a stroke. I looked fine. I felt fine.”
That changed when he participated in a stroke survivor-led writing group. During one of the sessions, he wrote a story inspired by the prompt: “How did I get here?” What came from that was a powerful metaphor that he now shares with others:
Imagine yourself before stroke as a pristine piece of paper—smooth, unblemished.
Then crumple it up.
That’s your reality after stroke: wrinkled, changed, but still useful.
Flatten it out, and it becomes Doug 2.0—never the same as before, but still capable of writing a beautiful new story.
How Doug Manages His Cognitive Fatigue
Doug shared several strategies that help him manage his energy and improve his quality of life:
A Message for Other Stroke Survivors
Doug knows that cognitive fatigue can be isolating. He understands the denial, the grief of not returning to work, and the uncertainty of how to move forward. But his message is clear:
“Don’t be in denial. Know that you can improve. Be kind to yourself. Take the bull by the horns—because there’s no end to what you can do. Bill and I are proof of that.”
Final Thoughts
If you’re struggling with cognitive fatigue after a stroke, know this: you are not alone. Recovery doesn’t always mean returning to who you were before—it means discovering who you are now.
Doug’s journey from “invisible stroke” to Doug 2.0 shows that even when life crumples you up, you can still unfold into something new. With patience, support, and self-kindness, your story isn’t over—it’s just being rewritten.
Cognitive Fatigue: The Crumpled Paper of Stroke: Embracing Life After Stroke
Doug’s invisible stroke left him cognitively fatigued—but his powerful story shows that healing, support, and meaning are still possible.
Support The Recovery After Stroke Podcast Through Patreon
Highlights:
00:00 Updates and Introduction to Doug Mitchell
02:16 Doug Mitchell’s Stroke Experience
06:47 The Concept of “Embracing 2.0”
11:30 Cognitive Fatigue After Stroke
27:26 Support Groups and Caregiver Involvement
35:19 Rebuilding After Stroke: Support, Awareness, and Recovery
47:07 Personal Growth and New Interests
53:41 Family and Social Support
1:02:54 Reflections on Life After Stroke
1:09:25 Final Thoughts and Advice
Transcript:
Updates and Introduction to Doug Mitchell
Bill Gasiamis 0:00
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Recovery After Stroke Podcast. Before we jump into the interview, I want to take a moment to share some exciting updates, and thank you for being a part of this growing community. Book sales have grown from 25 sales in December to 49 units sold in February, and it has been such a joy hearing from those of you who have emailed or commented to say how much the book has helped, or that you’re halfway through it and already feel inspired.
Bill Gasiamis 0:32
I love hearing how it’s resonating the audio podcast downloads are holding steady at around 5000 downloads per month. That’s across the whole back catalog of episodes and over on YouTube, the channel has just hit nearly 40,000 views across the entire channel in March, which is up 41% from February. We also welcome 368 new subscribers. So if you’re new, welcome also a big thank you for the beautiful response to the recent vlogs that I’ve done, especially the one I posted on post-traumatic growth.
Bill Gasiamis 0:32
It clearly struck a chord, and I’ll definitely be exploring more topics like that in future videos. And just a quick reminder, if you’re enjoying the show, one of the easiest way to support it is by listening through the ads. It really does help keep the podcast going. If you haven’t already, you can pick up a copy of my book, The Unexpected Way That A Stroke Became The Best Thing That Happened, at Amazon, by typing my name into the Amazon search bar. Also at recoveryafterstroke.com/book.
Bill Gasiamis 1:44
Now today’s episode, I’m joined by Doug Mitchell, a stroke survivor who brings warmth, wisdom and honesty to the conversation. Doug opens up about the emotional and mental journey of recovery and what it’s been like learning to live differently after stroke. He also shares a powerful analogy that beautifully captures the process of becoming someone new. Let’s dive in. Doug Mitchell, welcome to the podcast.
Doug Mitchell 2:14
Thank you, Bill.
Doug Mitchell’s Stroke Experience
Bill Gasiamis 2:16
Thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Tell me a little bit about what happened to you.
Doug Mitchell 2:21
All right, so, we’re going to go on almost five years now. So, March 4, 2020. I thought that I was having a heart attack, actually, and I came home from where I sent out to go to work and or, and I was driving, and I kind of just felt weird that day, so I turned around halfway there, and came home, and my wife was working off our at her business, so she wasn’t gone yet when the morning, when I came back, and I called her and talked to her, and then I said she’s so she left. And so after she left, I went to the hospital, so I didn’t really expand on what was going on.
Doug Mitchell 3:07
So I went to the hospital. And when I got there, they did some tests and they said they came back, and they actually did a CAT scan and stuff. So they came back and they said “Well, I got some good news and some bad news for you.” I go, okay. He goes “What do you want to hear first?” I said, it doesn’t matter, you just tell me, what’s going on, “So well, I’ll tell you right now. You haven’t had a heart attack, but since your last MRI in June of last year you’ve had three strokes.” I say, okay, alright. So, alright.
Doug Mitchell 3:46
So that kind of gave, well, my wife found out and all this stuff when, when she was being told, that kind of gave her some relief of why I’ve changed, and why my mood changed and different aspects of me changed, and she could never figure it out. And I couldn’t figure it out because I never saw the changes. So, after I think about a year, I went in at first a bubble test my heart and to find out I had a hole in my heart. That’s what allowed the clots to get into my brain. So I had three clots in my brain that messed up three parts of my brain.
Doug Mitchell 4:34
So what happened is 90% of my deficits are cognitive, so I consider that an invisible stroke. So I have an invisible stroke, and so being 90% cognitive, and 10% of it is my dominant left hand fine motor skills. Now I didn’t find out about that, at until two years into my recovery, because I got into a writing course that was put on by a stroke survivor in British Columbia. And she started this writing course, and it’s June honkings, and it’s with the stroke of my pen, and she started this writing course.
Doug Mitchell 5:22
So what she does in this writing course is she gives us a certain thing to do, like a certain thing to write about every week so, and it all needs to be like three paragraphs or so. So the one that I wrote the I I wrote my story on was the phrase that she gave us was, how did I get here? So I wrote that, I wrote a story and that about empowering 2.0 and I’ll tell you a little bit how that goes, if that’s okay.
Bill Gasiamis 6:02
Yeah.
Doug Mitchell 6:03
So during my journey and going through all these, I’ll call myself a zoom junkie. I go to all kinds of support groups, through the March of Dimes and different different organizations from BC and all over, all over Canada, and in going through these courses, or not courses, but talk, talkings and conversations I always kept hearing in the first couple of years is, you gotta find your new me. I’m going you gotta find your new me.
Doug Mitchell 6:37
That doesn’t make any sense to me. And I could never figure out, what do you mean the newbie, I couldn’t figure it out, come to find out. And thinking about that, is that I was in denial for the first two years.
The Concept of “Embracing 2.0” Despite The Cognitive Fatigue
Doug Mitchell 6:47
I was in denial that I never had a stroke, I was in denial that I’m 57 years old, I didn’t have a stroke. All this I’m not, nothing’s wrong with me, I look fine. My brain was always a stroke survivor, had physical issues with walking or arms or or whatever, talking and so what happened is that in this writing course, with June, when I wrote this empowering, embracing 2.0, I really started thinking, okay, so, and I’ll go through it just real quick, and then maybe you might be able to put it in on the chat, in your in your broadcast about where that is.
Doug Mitchell 7:36
And they can find it on my YouTube page. But imagine yourself before your stroke, and this is a piece of paper, so look how pristine this piece of paper is it’s flat, it’s white. There’s no crinkles, no nothing in it. You’re perfect, you’re who you were, who you are before stroke. So everything’s going cool. If you’re having a good time, your life’s going great, everything’s fine. And then take that piece of paper and then crumple it up. Crumple it up into a ball, crumple it up tight as you can whatever.
Doug Mitchell 8:16
Just take that piece of paper and crumple it up. This right now, is your journey to a crumpled reality of 2.0 so this is a crumpaled reality of 2.0 so now take this piece of paper and try to unfold it and fold it so it’s flat. Try to unfold it sort flat, try to get it as flat as you can. Can’t get it flat, why can’t I get why can’t I get this flat? Feel the highs and the lows and everything in this and the lines and all that, and and realize to yourself and find out that you’re never going to go back to I’ll consider, I’ll just say my name, Doug 1.0 I’m never going to get back to Doug 1.0.
Doug Mitchell 9:17
I’ve had three sections of my brain that have been affected through the strokes, and I never can get back to this pristine piece of paper. I’ll never get back to this pristine, so I had to realize that, okay, I’m in denial still. Now I now I’m trying to talk myself out in now, and I’m saying, okay, so I have to now brace myself as Doug 2.0, so this is Doug 2.0 all wrinkled and all kinds of cracks and and everything. So I gotta figure out life now, and figuring out life actually was wasn’t that bad.
Doug Mitchell 9:57
Because I was involved, like, I say, in so many different conversation groups and things from March of Dimes, there were some other things that, like Alisa Barker from Vancouver, British Columbia, she had a conversation group on Tuesdays, and then she had a talk group on Thursdays, and that was people from all over Canada that it was involved in that. And she was very instrumental in my recovery and getting with stroke survivors and learning about what can be done out there.
Doug Mitchell 10:36
And so he you just have to, I don’t know, it’s just that 2.0 really brought it home to me, and it doesn’t. And I don’t want to be negative, and it doesn’t. I don’t want to sound negative. Some people might think it is, but when I say you’re not going to get back to one point, no, that doesn’t mean you can’t progress.
Bill Gasiamis 10:57
Let’s pause here before we continue with Doug’s powerful story, I want to take a moment to thank my Patreon supporters. Your generosity helps ensure that this podcast remains free and accessible for stroke survivors around the world. If you’d like to support the show and become part of the Recovery After Stroke Community, you can learn more at patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke. Now let’s get back to Doug and his honest reflections on adapting to executive function loss and embracing life as Doug 2.0.
Cognitive Fatigue After Stroke
Doug Mitchell 11:30
You can progress as long as much as you want from 2.0 you can keep going and going and going. You’re a new person, or you’re new you, and that could be with your wife having mood changes and different things like that I don’t see I had mood changes and I couldn’t see them, but my wife could see him, and like I said when I went to the hospital, and after we got home, and she said “You know about the mood changes and noticing them before I went in and into the hospital and stuff, I actually had to in recovery.”
Doug Mitchell 12:13
I had to actually get into my doctor even suggested to possibly going on some antidepressants, and I said “No, I don’t need any antidepressants.” He goes “Well, a lot of stroke survivors do need antidepressants because they do get down and stuff.” So he wanted to try it. So I tried a couple different I’m going to call them cocktails. And we got to the third cocktail, and it’s the one that’s been working for me now. So I feel good about that.
Bill Gasiamis 12:44
So did they fix the hole in the heart?
Doug Mitchell 12:46
Yes, I had my PFO fixed, it’s, I call it, they put a drywall screw in the hole in my heart. But, yeah, they just go out through the groin and stick a device through there, and it balloons out on both sides, and then your heart heals around it.
Bill Gasiamis 13:07
Interesting. You went from being quote, unquote normal and perfectly fine and healthy to being diagnosed with three strokes, a hole in the heart and needing surgery, and it’s pretty full on, if you’ve gone unscathed to you know, so to speak, for 20, for 57 years, and then all of a sudden you’re dealing with all these things, it could be a lot to handle in it sense that you’re you, but you’re a new, you are you that’s got some scars that you’re carrying with you now, that you weren’t carrying with you before, and those scars change the way that you work.
Bill Gasiamis 13:49
They change the way that things move and operate and your flow and all sorts of things, and you’ve got to come to terms with it, and you’ve got to heal and you’ve got to accept it, and you have to grapple with it, so it’s common, it’s a common occurrence. Also, denial is very common, I hear so many strokes of others refused to accept it and deny that they had a stroke, and I’m not sure what’s behind that, whether it’s about ego or whether it’s something else. Do you have a sense of what was behind the denial for you?
Doug Mitchell 14:36
It was ego Bill, it was ego. And I’m a man, and there’s no way I had a stroke and I’m not going to, I’m not going to say I had a stroke and and stuff like that. And so you come to the realization that, yeah, um, another big part too is finding out I wouldn’t be able to go back to work. That was a huge hit, huge hit. And I found that out after my long term disability, and my neurologist actually sent me to to get a I got, I wrote it down somewhere here, I always forget what it is called neuropsych assessment.
Doug Mitchell 15:20
And when they did this neuropsych assessment, it took like, six hours to go through the testing and stuff and to come to find out I when I did the testing, I came out of it and came home and told my wife, I said, I aced that, that was awesome. I did really great that she was “Yeah.” I said “Yeah, that was I did good.” come to find out, when they gave me the results, I failed miserably.
Doug Mitchell 15:45
I had basically, they told me I lost my executive function so I could not, you know, have a hard time problem solving stuff like that. I get overstimulated, really easy, overwhelmed and things like that I didn’t really acknowledge until after I was told that.
Bill Gasiamis 16:12
How long after the initial diagnosis, did you have this neuro psych assessment?
Doug Mitchell 16:18
I think my neuro psych was around a year and three quarters in, probably after, so probably almost 2022.
Bill Gasiamis 16:28
Okay, so executive function, I’ve just made a inquiry into church apt, says that it affects, it includes your working memory, your cognitive flexibility, flexible thinking, inhibitory control, self regulation. It helps with decision making, supports self control in emotional and behavioral responses, enhances organization and time management, aids in multitasking and prioritizing plays a role in self motivation and goal setting.
Bill Gasiamis 17:06
How executive function affected by stroke, and then basically those things get challenged after the stroke. For you specifically, do you have troubles with organizing things?
Doug Mitchell 17:21
Yes, very much. So I can actually tell you exactly what I want you to do and exactly what needs to be done to get something done, but for me to go do it, I can’t do it, it’s weird. It is totally weird. Well, I can tell you, you know, you gotta take this hammer, you gotta pick this nail up. You gotta swing the hammer on the nail, put the nail in the hole, stuff like that. But for me to go out and do it, I can’t do it. It’s weird.
Bill Gasiamis 17:47
It’s like a task initiation thing, you can initiate the task.
Doug Mitchell 17:50
Yeah, initiation.
Bill Gasiamis 17:53
So I get that too, not I don’t have executive function challenges like that are common. But when I’m fatigued or tired, when I’ve had a massive day, and this stuff that I know needs to be done, and it could be the easiest thing, just the ability to just go and do it, actually, it’s not but it is not there, like it is actually physically not there, it doesn’t exist, that part of me doesn’t exist. So you could drag me to do it, you could make me do it, you could you’re just not there.
Bill Gasiamis 18:32
It doesn’t exist. It’s like it’s never happened before, and I don’t know how to comprehend what even I know. So it’s like it’s even I know what needs to be done, like you said, but the ability to do a task like that doesn’t there’s no spot for it in my brain.
Bill Gasiamis 18:49
I’ve never done it before, according to my brain, and therefore I can’t get it done now, the next morning, when I’ve recovered and had a rest, etc, then there’s no thought process. But the night before, it was just, that’s it not going to happen. Yeah, it doesn’t matter how important it is. It doesn’t matter how necessary, complicated, easy, basic, just doesn’t it’s not going to happen.
Doug Mitchell 19:15
See, like, with me, I have to chunk things out. Yeah, I have to chunk things out little increments, like, let’s say I’m going to make soup or something. In the morning, I might chop celery and onions, and then I might go sit down, and then I’ll come out and do something else, and I’ll have to go sit down and just chunk everything out. And then when I’m done, I got everything all ready to go, so when it’s time to make it.
Doug Mitchell 19:40
Everything’s there, and I can go ahead and make it. Everything’s gotta be written out for me, where I before would do everything off, off the top of my head. I would never use a recipe, I would never write anything down. But it all has to get chunked out to get it done.
Bill Gasiamis 19:57
What kind of work were you doing?
Doug Mitchell 19:59
I was management at General Motors. So I was, yeah, it was a high stressful.
Bill Gasiamis 20:07
A lot of things happening at once. Have you noticed in the last few years, has there been any kind of improvement? Are you seeing some spots or some areas in the way that you operate where you can say “Oh, okay, that’s changed, or that’s improved, that’s different, or that’s better.”
Doug Mitchell 20:26
Yeah, a lot of it is like, I sit down now and I analyze and, like, I say, chomping things. So I analyze, I write things down, what I want to get done. So, like, let’s here’s my situation where, at the beginning of my journey, I would try to get way too much done. I would go way overboard, I could just try to chunk, chug, chug, chug, chug through, and then it would just destroy me. And I would, you know, I’d be like, done the next day because I was pushing, pushing, pushing.
Doug Mitchell 21:02
I’m at the point now I can do three things a day, three things that I want to get done for the next day. And that might change overnight. I might get up in the morning go “Okay, I’m not going to do those three things. I’ll do something else.” but three things that’s I know that’s my limit right now.
Bill Gasiamis 21:18
And do you have days where you think I’m wiped out, nothing’s getting done today “That’s it” and then all of a sudden, you find a little bit of a burst of energy, and then you can get things done.
Doug Mitchell 21:29
Yeah, for sure, yeah.
Bill Gasiamis 21:32
I remember traveling with my wife and telling her, do not organize anything for us for tomorrow, because I am wiped out, that’s it. I don’t want to have anything to do with anybody, I’m not going anywhere. And then I wake up in the morning and I said to her “Okay, so what are we doing today?” And she said “I thought we weren’t going anywhere today.” I said “Well, yesterday I definitely wasn’t going anywhere, but today, I slept well, and I feel up to it, so why don’t we squeeze some stuff in?”
Doug Mitchell 21:59
Yep, and my wife can just look at me, and she’ll say, Doug, you gotta go lay down. I mean, I she’ll just look at me, just look, just a quick look, and Doug, you need to go lay down. So she knows, just by looking at me that, hey, it’s, you’re done. So yeah, it’s funny how that stuff works.
Bill Gasiamis 22:19
How long do your naps need to take?
Doug Mitchell 22:24
Usually an hour, I’ll take a nap in the afternoon. So what happens is that I’ll usually have two meetings in the morning, like one at 10 o’clock and maybe one at 1 o’clock, and then, let’s say 2:30 I’ll take an hour nap, and then I’ll get up and and go the rest of my day, right? And I usually have meetings, like tonight, I got one at 8, and stuff like that. So, yeah, it’s like, go, go, go. So usually I’m going to say I usually have at least three meetings a day, so that takes time, right?
Bill Gasiamis 22:58
Yeah, it does. It takes energy as well, like brain power, the whole works. Your snooze? Is it like a proper snooze? Are you out cold? Are you just kind of resting there with your eyes closed? What type of a rest is it?
Doug Mitchell 23:14
I’m normally out cold. Very rarely do I just close my eyes and just lay there. I do meditation now, which I never thought I would do in my lifetime. There’s you asked me at 1.0 I would say, What are you talking about? I’m not going to meditate.
Bill Gasiamis 23:34
You definitely had changed Doug, you definitely.
Doug Mitchell 23:36
Yes, I have. Yeah, I do a couple of those a week. So, yeah, it’s definitely helps.
Bill Gasiamis 23:44
How does it help?
Doug Mitchell 23:47
I think it calms me down when I get overwhelmed and stuff. Let’s say we go to Costco or the grocery store or something like that. I can actually just kind of walk over to the side and do a breathing exercise or something, just to try to calm down. What’s really helped me, Bill is I actually got into somebody actually suggested these on one of the calls, they’re called “Loops” LOOPS, and they’re like an ear plug.
Doug Mitchell 24:27
And you use them to and it takes certain decibels out of the out certain decibels, out of what you’re hearing. And those help a lot. So like going to Costco, the grocery store, or somewhere where I know a busy restaurant, I’ll put those in and it helps immensely.
Bill Gasiamis 24:50
Yeah, the good thing about the loop is it just looks like a regular ear plug, and it’s nothing legit, like what people might use to listen to music for. Example, like a wireless one, but it’s actually got nothing to do with that. What it is, it just takes out certain frequencies, and you can adjust it on the side of the earpiece. You can decrease the amount of noise, but you can still hear properly and have a conversation with somebody, but it takes off that. What do we call it extra extra feedback, extra information that your brain doesn’t want to deal with or cope with.
Bill Gasiamis 25:28
So for people who are interested in loop just, literally just go to loop.com I think it is LOOP.com, they are called Loop Ear Buds. There’s a few different types, and I think the most they cost is $100 and then there’s a couple of different versions that cost less than that. And they are super helpful for decreasing fatigue. Mine actually in my house, inside the house, instead of in the studio. So I can’t show you what they look like, but definitely look into them.
Doug Mitchell 26:04
Yeah, the $100 ones, like the ones you have, the ones I have, have a three position dial on them that you can change the three different positions. So that’s the most expensive on the ones that we’ve got, but, yeah.
Bill Gasiamis 26:15
Extremely helpful, I might do actually a review video. I might do a video and put it on my channel and have people discover it, come across it, whatever, because they’re super helpful. And there’s such a small investment, and you get a very big bang for your buck. You know, if you’re somebody who’s missed out on going to sporting events because they’re too loud, there’s too much going on, they are perfect for that. If you want to go to a concert or an opera or something like that, and you’ve avoided it because it’s too overwhelming, they are perfect for that.
Bill Gasiamis 26:51
I used to kind of enjoy going to a Grand Prix, for example, in the Melbourne Grand Prix here, and there’s no way I could go and sit through a day at the Grand Prix now, with the cars going around for hours, it would just drive me insane. It would make it painful, and it would make it unenjoyable, there’d be no point being there. So I’m at that point where I could definitely put the loop ear plugs in and just go down there and then enjoy my day for a few hours, something that I definitely have found myself avoiding after the stroke.
Support Groups and Caregiver Involvement
Bill Gasiamis 27:26
I never went to the football here for many, many years because of it, and I avoided concerts and things like that. But now they’re now I’m 13 years out Doug, so there’s a bit of a difference there. I have recovered that ability to deal with some sounds in short stints, so I can go to a concert without my earplugs, for example, but it would be way better if I took them with me.
Doug Mitchell 27:54
I think another thing too, that I don’t know talking with you is one thing that stroke survivors need to know is that there’s caregiver groups out there, and caregiver groups are extremely important for your relationship in for your caregiver to understand your stroke journey. Because if you have, I’ll tell you something, going to these meetings, not I mean that stroke survivor meetings, you’re talking to people that understand you completely.
Doug Mitchell 28:37
The whole thing. It’s like a family you’re going to see 30 family members that day for an hour, right? And for the caregiver, my wife’s part of the caregiver group, and that helped her a lot, because we really didn’t have a big understanding of stroke and that and how it affects you, but that the caregiver group has helped her immensely.
Bill Gasiamis 29:08
Yeah, because she completely doesn’t understand you, but she completely understands the caregivers, and they completely understand her.
Doug Mitchell 29:15
Yeah, exactly it’s that’s the way it works.
Bill Gasiamis 29:19
So they can go there and talk about the challenges, the frustrations, their concerns, all those things. And they can have somebody go, yeah, that’s normal, like we’re doing, we’re normalizing certain things. And then you can that kind of takes a bit of the weight off it. It makes it feel a little lighter, and you’ve shared it to other people, and they’ve given you some advice, and they’ve clued you into things that you didn’t know you needed to know about being a caregiver and and that’s the thing about stroke support groups, same thing.
Bill Gasiamis 29:52
And because I’m also quite like you, in that you know need to have people, to talk to about. I created a podcast because the caregiver, sorry, the support groups were few and far between when I was starting to go through this, and I thought “Oh, well, I’ll just invite people on to a show, and we’ll talk about it once or twice a week, every week from now on.” And that’s my version of it.
Doug Mitchell 30:20
Yeah, it’s incredible that you did this. And that’s one of the one of the benefits, if you want to say it’s a benefit of COVID, is that people got into, you know, online things. So for March of Dimes to get online and do support online was huge. SR ABC out of British Columbia doing their online stuff, all these different organizations that do it is, I don’t know what I would done if I didn’t have virtual my whole recovery was virtual. I went, my reminder is that March of 2020 was shut down. So my recovery was all done virtually from Parkway density or Parkway recovery.
Doug Mitchell 31:09
And I had a team of seven people, and they they called me, not all seven every day, but a certain amount would call me every day and talk about different things, of PT and OT and and stuff like that, nurse and it was kind of tough at the beginning, because I didn’t think I would want to be on on video. I didn’t think I’d want to talk to somebody at an iPad, just look at them and talk, but now I love it. And it’s really, it’s been instrumental, because I don’t know what I would have done without the support of all these different channels.
Bill Gasiamis 31:49
It’s so efficient as well, right? The one thing that I struggled with was finding the time to go to three appointments of rehab in 2015 when I had done outpatient rehab after my brain surgery. Man, that was such a tough thing to do, because they were three different appointments on three different days, and I had to get there, and because my wife was working, and I was quite independent. By then, I wasn’t driving, but I was quite independent. I would have to, you know, get public transport, and that will take around an hour or so to get there.
Bill Gasiamis 32:26
Then I would have an hour’s session, and then I will take an hour to get back home, and then it was like, my god, there’s one, and then I’m pooped at the end of it, and then there’s one entire day gone just for one hour of rehab, and that happened three days a week, and then it was physical rehab. So it’s important that I was there. However, the other part of rehab, you know, the other part that’s important, this conversation, part of it, this talking, part of it, the efficiency of just being able to wake up, sit down at a chair, switch on a computer and do that.
Bill Gasiamis 33:03
I think, is just it’s the most amazing thing we live in, the most amazing times. It’s just brilliant that I’m talking to you in Canada and we’re seeing each other. I mean, that’s just ridiculous. I just can’t get my head around it. And and our community, our community is all over the world. It is actually a community, even though we can’t do the touchy feely huggy stuff face to face, because the people that follow the podcast interact with it on YouTube. They leave comments, they share they get responses from me.
Bill Gasiamis 33:40
We share information, we like each other’s comments, or we respond to each other’s comments, and it’s like that’s a proper community. It never existed, say, before 2012 when I when all of my journeys started, it just didn’t exist. And I was stuck because a lot of the support groups that we went to in the beginning that I went to, a few of them, people were so unwell, they couldn’t turn up a lot of the time. And then what do you do? You go to a support group and only two out of the 10 people turned up. It’s kind of not the same.
Doug Mitchell 34:19
Yeah, we’re London’s about 490,000 people. It’s the number one, one of the number one stroke hospitals, the University Hospital in London, and we have for our in person meeting once a month, second Thursday of every month, we have six or seven people that go and out of those six or seven people, I’m probably one of the oldest, not the oldest in age, but the oldest in recovery five years. It’s crazy.
Doug Mitchell 35:05
There’s 1000s of people in London that have had strokes, yeah, and why aren’t they involved in a lot of these, like even the in person groups. It’s just that’s crazy, it just It blows my mind.
Rebuilding After Stroke And Cognitive Fatigue: Support, Awareness, and Recovery
Bill Gasiamis 35:19
Do you think a lot of people are doing it on their own, or maybe have, you know, like, ego getting in the way, all that type of thing not to attend. Or do you think it’s something to do with that, as well as what stroke does to people?
Doug Mitchell 35:35
Well, you think about how many people are struggling out there, that may have not gotten any support or the a pamphlet or something to say this is available here. You can get this here. It’s, I don’t know right now, since COVID London hasn’t had the caregiver or the support that you can go in the hospital and talk to stroke survivors, so they haven’t had that going yet. And they’re starting, they’re going to get it going, supposedly, again.
Doug Mitchell 36:12
But that’s what I would like to see go and see, is, what are the survivors getting when they leave the hospital. What kind of information are they getting? I know if I got a book of a pamphlet of information leaving the hospital, I probably wouldn’t even have looked at it, be honest with you, but, and that’s possibly, that’s what they haven’t done either I don’t know what they’re getting.
Bill Gasiamis 36:39
And maybe also maybe they’re suffering in silence, maybe they’re struggling alone, and they don’t know. And hopefully they come across an interview like this and makes them think about the possibility of not suffering in silence and reaching out. People are all always willing to help them, and there’s so many people willing to help in the hospitals in Australia, the Stroke Foundation has a goal to reach 85% of the people that turn up to hospital with stroke symptoms or their family members.
Bill Gasiamis 37:16
Reach them with a pamphlet, a booklet that says, now you’ve had a stroke, you know what’s next type of thing? And they’re hoping to get to 85% of the people that are hospitalized for a stroke. But that’s a big ask, because yes, the reality of stroke is different for everybody, and also they’re relying on, I think they’re relying on part of the medical team to go grab that brochure from the cupboard and take it out and present it and explain it and go through it. But that is on their to do list.
Bill Gasiamis 37:55
They’re definitely looking at how they can reach more stroke survivors and let them know about the support that exists because they’ve been around for about 27 years or so, and they’re trying to improve outcomes, and that’s one of the ways they figure, if we can start at the very beginning of the journey, that’d be a lot easier.
Doug Mitchell 38:17
Now in Australia, do you guys have a March of Dimes. Is March of Dimes prevalent and in Australia, or do they have a program? Or is there a program in Australia that would be like a program like March of Dimes, like, we have to have a lot of different supports for stroke survivors?
Bill Gasiamis 38:36
No, there isn’t at all. The only organization is the Stroke Foundation and they have some programs. They have some support, but there’s a lot of local support nonprofits that help where they can, and they’re fragmented. They’re all over the place. But I think what’s good about them being fragmented is that they serve the need where the need is. And although the Stroke Foundation has reach in most of Australia, it’s still not fully funded. It’s not funded enough to be able to provide services. It relies on donations, and also some government funding.
Bill Gasiamis 39:19
And government funding has been decreasing, especially since COVID and all that stuff that we’ve been through.
Doug Mitchell 39:26
Fair enough.
Bill Gasiamis 39:27
Yeah, so it’s quite a it’s quite a challenge. Now, March of Dimes has so many by the looks, I think, so many different aspects to it is it? Tell me a little bit about it. What is it long? What is it like?
Doug Mitchell 39:46
Well, for the stroke aspect of it, March of Dimes started years and years ago for polio, and I don’t know when exactly they got into the stroke cost support, but they have all kinds of different like, I say the different. They have aphasia groups for aphasia, they have musical group things. They got meditations, they have exercise, chair exercise and stuff like that. There’s a multitude of things that they have that they endorse, to try to get people involved in and to try to help them, help them recover. Yeah, they’re very good.
Bill Gasiamis 40:34
The Stroke March of Dimes page is afterstroke.ca, for Canada, and it’s got resources, get involved. Volunteer with us, get support, support groups, online programs, and then refer, allows healthcare providers to refer a patient to that organization for support. So it sounds like it’s got quite a good level of support for stroke survivors, which is really cool. It’s basically what Stroke Foundation does, but it is not part of a larger organization. Is just specifically tailored for stroke survivors. It started off as a stroke support group.
Doug Mitchell 41:25
I was going to say that a lot of people, and this is what I got out of like these programs too, is that it’s kind of funny, because you’ll talk to people and people like with aphasia and stuff like, I have aphasia, but I don’t really have the speaking part of it. I have the word finding and stuff like that aspect of it. But you’ll hear people on these calls, and they’re talking and and like, let’s say six, seven months later, you’ll say, man, you’re talking great, you know. And they’ll go, no, I’m not. And they don’t see it, they don’t see it.
Doug Mitchell 42:00
So what you need to do is, what needs to be done is, if you have a deficit and you don’t like anything, it doesn’t matter what it is, even the the minute little improvement is an improvement. But have the loved one or a caregiver or somebody in your family videotape you, and this video tape you for maybe to a minute or two, and then maybe three months later down the road, did it tape you again, and have you see them both? You may see a change.
Doug Mitchell 42:30
You may not see a change, but I’m going to almost guarantee you’re going to see something that’s changed. So you can keep doing that and see your progress and and that is a real eye opener for a lot of people.
Bill Gasiamis 42:44
It helps to demonstrate improvement and make you feel like you’re actually on the path to recovery and you’re improving and things are getting better. That’s really important to know that things are improving, and we’re so hard on ourselves. Most people are really hard on themselves, and as a stroke survivor, you need to give yourself a little bit more grace. It doesn’t need to be so much perfection and going after immaculate kind of sentences and all that type of stuff, it’s not coming.
Bill Gasiamis 43:15
It’s not coming, as long as it’s improving, and you can see that will give you a little bit of a boost and make you feel a little better about how things are progressing, I love that. That is a great comment. I’m curious, is all the support groups that you attend and those things? Are they your counseling? Is that kind of, have you do you go and see a counselor? Have you seen a counselor about any of this stuff, or have you kind of used the support groups to play that role or to take over from there?
Doug Mitchell 43:54
Yeah, I’ve never seen a therapist or anything like that, support groups are my therapy. Yeah, they’re my therapy, I learned the most out of those groups that you know I and it’s, and it’s almost like every session, you learn something. It either you learn something about the person that’s talking or you learn something about the stroke journey that you never knew about before. And yeah, it’s that’s, I use it as a, I use that as a my therapy, I believe, and I try to help other people out too, right?
Doug Mitchell 44:27
I mean, we have people Bill, we have people that are in those meetings that are 30 year stroke survivors. And I’m just like 30 year stroke surviving, they’re still coming to these meetings. Well, let’s say they didn’t start till 2020 but they’re coming to these meetings, and it’s like 30 years in, and you’re coming to these meetings and it’s just, it blows it, just yeah, just I just go, wow.
Bill Gasiamis 44:53
Strokes a gift that keeps on giving, though. Doug, like, yeah, it never leaves you once it’s come and it’s done its thing. And, yeah, it never goes away. You don’t wake up in the morning one day and “Oh, my legs back, or everything is back.” That’s the thing, it improves and it changes. And what I’m finding is, in the last sort of six months, my deficits on my left side have changed, and they’re what they are is they’re more noticeable now, not that I wasn’t noticing them or paying attention to them before they’re playing up a little more often.
Bill Gasiamis 45:27
And they’re letting me know, you know, your leg is not right, your arm is not right, your muscles are tight. It’s doing it more often, your shoulder is a little bit not right. But it never entered my mind as often as it does these days, and I’m not overthinking it like it physically needs more rehab, so I’ll go and get a massage more often than I used to, because it needs, I need some help to release it all along my back and down my left side and my chest and all that kind of stuff. It’s all over the place and and it hasn’t been so that’s the thing about stroke.
Bill Gasiamis 46:03
Like it bugs you. It can bug you all the time, and it’s like, okay, you need to deal with it. If you don’t expel that energy or comprehend it or find another way or focus on something else, like it can get you down. So I think it’s really important that people seek out ongoing support of some sort, and from people who are equipped to help you, bitching and moaning to family member who doesn’t really care or can’t support you or doesn’t know how to is probably not the right way to go about it.
Bill Gasiamis 46:39
It’s best that you talk to those people about the things that they can handle, and then you’re chatting to somebody else that understands you and what you’re going through for the stroke stuff. How else do you occupy your time? Were you into sports and any of that type of thing. Did you do anything physical that you’re not doing anymore?
Personal Growth and New Interests
Doug Mitchell 47:07
Watching sports, I did a lot of that. I love watching sports. I do a lot of smoking, I smoke meats, so barbecue and stuff like that. And since the stroke I’ve taken up sour bread, dough making, so made my own starter, all that stuff. So that goes on a little bit and with my dominant left hand not being able to write.
Doug Mitchell 47:40
When I found that out two years in my wife and I actually went and found and I know one of these, call was brought to my attention that, like, go to the dollar store and grab some like, three year old or like, third grade writing books and trace the letters and do stuff like that, and get, like, adult coloring book and color and try to stay in between the lines that helped really a lot with the fine motor skills.
Doug Mitchell 48:12
And I can somewhat right now that it doesn’t look like a doctor’s signature or a doctor’s writing. I can, because before I could write notes and the next day, go look at it and go, What the hell is that? I wouldn’t know. I would not know what was there. And I don’t. I was definitely saying something, but I don’t know what it was.
Bill Gasiamis 48:32
And you type on the keyboard with your left hand, does that work?
Doug Mitchell 48:35
Yeah, no, I can type and everything like that, it’s just weird. It’s just the writing part of it. It’s, yeah, I don’t know.
Bill Gasiamis 48:42
Yeah, maybe it’s a type of aphasia.
Doug Mitchell 48:44
Typing is fine. Most of the things I do with is on the iPad, so it’s just on a, it’s not like a typing on a keyboard of a computer. Basically, it’s finger pointing.
Bill Gasiamis 48:58
Yeah, right. Okay, well, single finger would the writing be a part of the aphasia?
Doug Mitchell 49:05
I’m not positive Bill, how that works and how that comes off, comes about. It could be, I just chalk it up to be in part of the stroke that took, like, a little bit of fine motor skills away from my dominant hand. Like, yeah, I don’t know, it’s weird.
Bill Gasiamis 49:24
Yeah, but you found that there’s been an improvement in that space as well.
Doug Mitchell 49:27
Yeah, there’s been improvement. Like, at the beginning, the first couple years, I really like eating in that my hand would shake and stuff like that, almost like I had Parkinson’s disease or something like that. But that’s all went away pretty much now, and yeah, so I don’t know.
Bill Gasiamis 49:44
And what about the weather? I know Canada can be cold, impact only differently.
Doug Mitchell 49:50
I don’t think so. Yes, it has, I could wear shorts all year long. And I get cold now, easier, a lot easier since the stroke. Yeah, I get cold a lot easier now. So that that’s the one thing that I notice, is the cold.
Bill Gasiamis 50:15
You can wear cool, you could wear shorts all year round. So even in Canada, when you’re going about your business.
Doug Mitchell 50:22
I would snow blow in shorts, Bill.
Bill Gasiamis 50:25
Man.
Doug Mitchell 50:29
Neighbors would laugh. They’d have fun with it, but yeah, I would snow blow it short time.
Bill Gasiamis 50:33
Yeah, that’s insane. I can’t deal with the cold, and the cold bothers me so much more than it used to, and it used to bother me a lot, I just never liked it. And I always love summer, and people in summer, we get 100 more than 100 degrees, days on a regular basis here, 40 degrees, 38 degrees Celsius, you know, 36 degrees Celsius. And everyone else around me is just not coping. And I’m like “Bring it on.” Like the hotter, the better. As long as I get some sleep at night, I don’t mind how hot it is.
Bill Gasiamis 51:10
Of course, I don’t mind the relief of coming inside to an air conditioning, air conditioned room. Every so often I do, but it doesn’t get me down. Like winter gets me down. I even these days since the stroke, I get those winter blues that people talk about, when there’s not enough sun in the sky, when there’s not enough hours of daylight, and you’re probably lacking, I’m not sure, all the things that the sun allows you to experience. And I really get blue, and it just makes me feel more blue than ever before. And I noticed the pattern, especially in the last two or three years.
Bill Gasiamis 51:47
And during COVID, I think I had, like, lots of reasons to feel that way. But during COVID Melbourne lockdowns, we were in lockdown for, you know, the best part of two and a half years. So, I was a really difficult person to be around in winter, and I couldn’t wait for those sunny days. I’d just go out, spend all day outside, and then wait, waited for the shortest day of the year to come around and be done with it, the winter solstice, and then just be going, we had two extra minutes of sun.
Doug Mitchell 52:32
Yes, the best, yeah.
Bill Gasiamis 52:33
And counting. Like, I’m finding myself doing weird stuff like that and now I’m noticing we’re in the last month of summer, and I’m noticing that the Nightfall used to be at around 9pm and now it’s got down to about 20 past eight, and now it’s starting to shrink, and at the end of next month, daylight savings is going to kick in. So we’re going to lose an hour of daylight. And I was thinking about it yesterday. I’m going to be putting the blinds down at night in the house. I’m going to be putting them down at seven o’clock in a month.
Doug Mitchell 53:14
In two weeks, we go daylight savings time, so we’re going to get, it’s going to get lighter at night. So it’s that’s going to be good. It’s just, it’s so weird, like, Bill’s in the future. Right now, I’m talking in the future because Bill’s in Friday now, right? I’m just talking my wife’s in here too. So, yeah, it’s, that’s gonna be good.
Family and Social Support
Bill Gasiamis 53:40
They’re the things that occupy my time. I didn’t realize how important it is to me until after the stroke, and how much the weather, the temperature, the time, the daylight, how it all does actually impact me, and I need to be aware of it, especially in winter, when I get a little bit down, a little bit blue. So what is the family situation like, how many of you in the house? Who else went along this journey with you? Other than your wife.
Doug Mitchell 54:13
Just me and my wife, Tracy, she’s sitting here, just us. We have no kids, been married for 10 years. Yeah, that’s just been us. And then she when I had my stroke, basically, she was told that she they came to work from home then, and they never got they never went back. So she’s been working from home now for the whole time. So that was good too, to have somebody in the house, and that’s what that really helped a lot, too.
Bill Gasiamis 54:57
So you kind of had a bit of like, a really good run afterwards, every things seem to line up really well for you.
Doug Mitchell 55:08
Yeah, for sure, very lucky. Yeah, that’s 24/7.
Bill Gasiamis 55:14
Yeah, that’s a blessing. So, are you a spiritual, religious man? Did you have any of those types of journeys, or did you contemplate that where you’ve never contemplated it before?
Doug Mitchell 55:33
Actually, no, I have not. It’s kind of funny, because I do think about it at times. There’s when I was a youngster, young kid, I was an altar boy and all that stuff in Episcopal Church and things like that. And I did that, I think, until I was a sophomore in high school. So probably from grade 5 till I was a sophomore in high school. So I go with my mom, and it was just basically me and my mom, my brother and my sister really didn’t go very often. And we go to church and do that kind of stuff, but no, I didn’t. I never really got into that aspect of it again.
Bill Gasiamis 56:14
Did you have any type of existential crisis or anything like that when you finally, you know at 57 well, just after 57 accepted that you went through this thing. Did you contemplate mortality, or any of those things?
Doug Mitchell 56:31
No, not really, because I think with myself, Bill, is that I know why I had the stroke, supposedly, the hole in the heart, so they plugged the hole, and supposedly that’s going to take care of everything. I can have a stroke any other way, I can still have a stroke. I know that I can still have a stroke, but I would, I could say “Okay, it’s not my fault.” The stroke wasn’t my fault, there’s no whine. It was a hole in my heart that allowed the thoughts to get in my brain. It wasn’t something that I did to myself, so that’s kind of how I got through that, I think.
Bill Gasiamis 57:11
Yeah, you seem like a no nonsense, mild mannered kind of guy. Just goes about business, what sounds like you’re a problem solver. Look for solutions rather than focus on the problems.
Doug Mitchell 57:22
Yeah.
Bill Gasiamis 57:24
It seems to be holding you in good stead, there definitely seems to be holding you in good stead, and that’s great. You know that you’ve been able to find support that you need. You’ve been able to resolve the cause of the stroke, which is great. You’ve been able to find a way to go about business now, at home and elsewhere, and that you’re noticing that things are improving. Your analogy is pretty profound, the fact that you know you spoke about that piece of paper, crinkled it up, and then you open it up and it’s still the same piece of paper, but it just looks different.
Bill Gasiamis 58:03
And the crinkles kind of never go. That’s a really good way to to kind of analyze your situation and accept the changes that have occurred. And maybe, and it seems like these changes a little bit more profound, perhaps, than any other changes that you’ve gone through in your in your life. And have you had like this type of a contemplative opportunity on any other changes that you’ve been through in your life up until the age of 57, did you sort of sit and ponder anything like you have in this situation?
Doug Mitchell 58:45
No, I didn’t, I never did. No, this was a really, and, like I said, finding the new me. And it’s just like I cannot understand what you guys are even talking about. But when I got it into the 2.0, that really put it in at that, threw it in my face that, okay, this is what’s going on.
Doug Mitchell 59:08
And, like you say, the analogy with when you have that paper folded out with all the wrinkles and all that stuff in it, that really, that really works well with groups and stuff like that, because they can see it and they can feel it and stuff like that. So it’s kind of profound on how it how it affects different people.
Bill Gasiamis 59:33
The Doug Mitchell paper analogy, I’m going to definitely refer back to that one often, I think.
Doug Mitchell 59:40
It embraces 2.0.
Bill Gasiamis 59:42
Yeah, it says so much in such a quick, succinct and precise way, both visually and audibly. It just says so much, and it really makes sense. It does describe me to an extent as well. So yes, and yeah, I love the idea of being able to share that with people and bridging that gap really effectively and quickly, and then allowing that person to just actually have a physical representation of that by taking that paper with them, if they choose to, and then using that to explain it to other people as well, so that other people know what happened.
Bill Gasiamis 1:00:25
You know that something has happened. Does it give you a greater insight into what other people are facing? Were you oblivious to other people’s perils, like I was before stroke? Or were you kind of “Oh, okay, I see what it was like for some other people that I’d come across in the past.”
Doug Mitchell 1:00:47
Before stroke, no. I wouldn’t even thought anything till after I had the stroke, and then I could see what it’s done, and how people are handling it and things like that, is really, you really have a different aspect on life after you’ve had a stroke, when, number one, you lived. That’s number one, you lived, okay, there’s so many people out there that die and have a stroke and die, yeah, so you lived.
Doug Mitchell 1:01:19
So that’s one good thing, and the other ones are that you can improve. It’s a pretty simple situation, that you can go out there and improve and be Doug 2.0 and be a very well rounded Doug 2.0 you just gotta have the faith, I guess the faith to accept, right? You gotta accept, you can’t be in Durham. I’ll tell you that.
Bill Gasiamis 1:01:50
I love the fact that you said faith. I mean, it’s still applicable, that word it’s not always needs, doesn’t always need to be associated with religion and religious faith, but as a concept, faith is, I think, is bigger than religion or religious faith, because we all have faith, whether you’re aware religious or not, and you have faith driving down the road that the guy’s going to stay on the side of the road, that he needs to stay on right if you didn’t, you couldn’t go anywhere. You have faith that you’re going to walk out of your house and somebody’s not going to come out and just attack you.
Bill Gasiamis 1:02:27
I know it happens from time to time, but the majority of the time you need to have faith in something. The religious faith is also an extension of that I believe and and perhaps came after just generalized faith. I’m thinking back in the day when perhaps, you know, Neanderthals existed and there was no religion. They even may not have known about the word faith and understood it the way that we understand it.
Reflections on Life After Stroke And Cognitive Fatigue
Bill Gasiamis 1:02:54
But they also practiced faith. You know, they woke up in the morning and they took their tools and they went to source food and bring it back for their family, and they had faith that they would be able to carry out those tasks. So, yeah, faith, it’s a good word, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be religious faith, although some people find religious face. Faith really helpful after an existential crisis like a stroke, which I totally get, like, no problem at all. What’s been the hardest thing about stroke for you though?
Doug Mitchell 1:03:38
One of the hardest things was not being able to go back to work, that was huge. That was huge, and that was it was like hitting your head against the brick wall when they came back after that assessment and said that I failed it miserably, and that I had, I lost my executive function. So then going through and listening to what you said about executive function through AI, everything that you said is my deficits, everything, it’s just my wife sitting over there going, yes, and yeah, it’s those are my deficits.
Doug Mitchell 1:04:23
And in, I guess, I don’t know, I guess losing that the working aspect of life, and then trying to figure out what you’re going to do, to try to fill your days up and stuff like that. So my mind is basically support groups and helping other people get better and try to support those as much as I can. And yeah, and I enjoy doing that. That’s good work.
Bill Gasiamis 1:05:02
Yeah, it is. That fills the gap really well. What has stroke taught you?
Doug Mitchell 1:05:13
It’s taught me to be kind to myself, and it’s taught me I can accept to do different things like meditation and different things like that, that I would have never, ever thought of doing thought and even writing, getting in that writing course and doing the writing I would never, ever think about that. I would never have thought that Doug would be a writer. And, yeah, I enjoy it. It’s just stuff that you just, you didn’t think you’d enjoy, but you enjoy it. So there’s things that can happen that can be different, for sure.
Bill Gasiamis 1:05:57
You’re so stereotypical. I mean, you’re exactly like the majority of the blokes that I’ve spoken to that go through stroke and realize “Ah, you can meditate.” It’s not a city sport you know, to meditate. It’s like, it’s okay. And that was me, that was me. Podcast, meditation, not smoking or drinking anymore, writing a book, all these weird things that before 37 year old Bill that didn’t even cross my path, they weren’t even like a blip in the radar.
Bill Gasiamis 1:06:37
There was no chance that I was going to be doing any of those stuff, frowned upon, that stuff, like, I wasn’t terrible at towards other people about it, but kind of thought that would be strange and weird and all that kind of stuff. I have no idea why I even thought those things. And then all of a sudden, everything was a possibility for me. And it’s like, how is all this stuff a possibility now, but it wasn’t before?
Doug Mitchell 1:07:05
Yeah, for sure.
Bill Gasiamis 1:07:07
But it’s done the same thing for me. It’s allowed me to kind of just go, okay, there’s more to the world than just the same stuff you’ve done for the last 20 years solid. Yeah, you can do something else, experience something different. What would you like to say to people who are listening and watching that are just starting their journey? Perhaps, or, like you said, have also been through 30 years of stroke recovery and just coming across the first podcast, for example maybe.
Doug Mitchell 1:07:43
I would say, try to join a group, if you could. And try to put yourself, be kind to yourself, for one. Number two, work hard at getting better on on different aspects of your deficiencies and stuff like that. It’s kind of sad that like yourselves in Australia, and I don’t know the UK, and all these other different places that are going to be watching us don’t have the support groups that we do. It’s it really, it kind of hurts me to hear that you guys don’t have that support.
Doug Mitchell 1:08:30
But, yeah, just number one, don’t be in denial. Number two, know that you can improve. Number three, there’s all kinds of stuff out there in the world that you can do now that you can grab a hold of and take the bull by the horns and go after it right. There’s no ending of what you can do so and like I said “Bill and I are proof of that.” And check out embracing 2.0, and hopefully that will help you realize that. There’s a good life out there to be had.
Bill Gasiamis 1:09:16
Yeah, on that note, Doug, thank you so much for reaching out and joining in the podcast.
Doug Mitchell 1:09:22
I appreciate it, Bill, thanks for your time.
Final Thoughts and Advice
Bill Gasiamis 1:09:25
Well, that wraps up an incredible, moving episode with Doug Mitchell. His story is a powerful reminder that not all stroke challenges are visible, and that executive function loss can change everything about how we move through the world. Doug’s willingness to talk about the hard stuff, denial, overwhelm, cognitive struggles and identity loss make this episode especially meaningful. And his message about embracing change, being kind to yourself and finding community through support groups is something I hope resonates with you as much as it did with me.
Bill Gasiamis 1:10:00
If you want to revisit Doug’s crumpled paper analogy to learn more about his project, embracing 2.0 you’ll find links in the show notes. Before we go, I want to remind you once more about my book, The Unexpected Way That A Stroke Became The Best Thing That Happened. If Doug’s story hit home for you, there’s more like it in the book, stories about growth, resilience and rediscovering purpose after stroke, you can find it on Amazon or at recoveryfterstroke.com/book.
Bill Gasiamis 1:10:30
And I want to leave you with this, just recently, someone left a comment on YouTube saying they were listening to this podcast from their hospital bed having just been diagnosed with a stroke that hit me really hard. It’s a powerful reminder of why we do this, why these stories matter, and how important it is to feel supported and understood, not alone, especially at the beginning of such a life changing journey.
Bill Gasiamis 1:10:59
If today’s episode inspired you, please consider leaving a five star review on Spotify or iTunes, or liking and commenting if you’re watching on YouTube, your engagement helps this content reach more people. People like that stroke survivor in the hospital bed who just needed to hear that there’s hope on the other side. Thank you again for being here. I’ll catch you in the next episode.
Intro 1:11:25
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The post Understanding Cognitive Fatigue After Stroke: Doug’s Journey to Doug 2.0 appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.
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By Recovery After Stroke
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For many stroke survivors, the most challenging part of recovery isn’t always physical—it’s the mental exhaustion that follows them day after day. This deep, unshakable tiredness is known as cognitive fatigue, and it affects countless people who appear “fine” on the outside but are working incredibly hard behind the scenes just to function.
One stroke survivor who knows this all too well is Doug Mitchell.
What Is Cognitive Fatigue?
Cognitive fatigue is a kind of mental exhaustion that goes far beyond being “tired.” It affects your ability to think clearly, stay focused, solve problems, and complete everyday tasks. After a stroke, the brain works harder to reroute and compensate for damaged areas. Even simple activities like holding a conversation, reading a sentence, or planning a meal can feel like climbing a mountain.
Unlike physical fatigue, cognitive fatigue is invisible. It’s not something people can see—but you feel it deeply. And unfortunately, it’s often misunderstood by others who don’t know what it’s like to live with a brain that’s trying to heal.
Doug’s Story: The Invisible Stroke
Doug Mitchell lived with cognitive fatigue for two years before realizing what had happened to him. He went to the hospital thinking he might be having a heart attack, only to learn he’d had three strokes—and never knew it. The strokes were caused by a hole in his heart, and they impacted three areas of his brain, leaving him with 90% cognitive and 10% physical deficits.
Doug calls his experience an “invisible stroke” because, from the outside, he looked fine. But inside, his brain was struggling with memory, attention, task initiation, and mood regulation.
One of the hardest moments for Doug was undergoing a neuropsychological assessment. He thought he had aced the test. But the results showed he had lost his executive function—a term that includes abilities like decision-making, multitasking, and emotional regulation. These are exactly the areas impacted by cognitive fatigue.
The Power of Acceptance and Doug 2.0
For the first two years, Doug was in denial. He couldn’t believe he’d had a stroke. In his words:
“I’m a man. There’s no way I had a stroke. I looked fine. I felt fine.”
That changed when he participated in a stroke survivor-led writing group. During one of the sessions, he wrote a story inspired by the prompt: “How did I get here?” What came from that was a powerful metaphor that he now shares with others:
Imagine yourself before stroke as a pristine piece of paper—smooth, unblemished.
Then crumple it up.
That’s your reality after stroke: wrinkled, changed, but still useful.
Flatten it out, and it becomes Doug 2.0—never the same as before, but still capable of writing a beautiful new story.
How Doug Manages His Cognitive Fatigue
Doug shared several strategies that help him manage his energy and improve his quality of life:
A Message for Other Stroke Survivors
Doug knows that cognitive fatigue can be isolating. He understands the denial, the grief of not returning to work, and the uncertainty of how to move forward. But his message is clear:
“Don’t be in denial. Know that you can improve. Be kind to yourself. Take the bull by the horns—because there’s no end to what you can do. Bill and I are proof of that.”
Final Thoughts
If you’re struggling with cognitive fatigue after a stroke, know this: you are not alone. Recovery doesn’t always mean returning to who you were before—it means discovering who you are now.
Doug’s journey from “invisible stroke” to Doug 2.0 shows that even when life crumples you up, you can still unfold into something new. With patience, support, and self-kindness, your story isn’t over—it’s just being rewritten.
Cognitive Fatigue: The Crumpled Paper of Stroke: Embracing Life After Stroke
Doug’s invisible stroke left him cognitively fatigued—but his powerful story shows that healing, support, and meaning are still possible.
Support The Recovery After Stroke Podcast Through Patreon
Highlights:
00:00 Updates and Introduction to Doug Mitchell
02:16 Doug Mitchell’s Stroke Experience
06:47 The Concept of “Embracing 2.0”
11:30 Cognitive Fatigue After Stroke
27:26 Support Groups and Caregiver Involvement
35:19 Rebuilding After Stroke: Support, Awareness, and Recovery
47:07 Personal Growth and New Interests
53:41 Family and Social Support
1:02:54 Reflections on Life After Stroke
1:09:25 Final Thoughts and Advice
Transcript:
Updates and Introduction to Doug Mitchell
Bill Gasiamis 0:00
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Recovery After Stroke Podcast. Before we jump into the interview, I want to take a moment to share some exciting updates, and thank you for being a part of this growing community. Book sales have grown from 25 sales in December to 49 units sold in February, and it has been such a joy hearing from those of you who have emailed or commented to say how much the book has helped, or that you’re halfway through it and already feel inspired.
Bill Gasiamis 0:32
I love hearing how it’s resonating the audio podcast downloads are holding steady at around 5000 downloads per month. That’s across the whole back catalog of episodes and over on YouTube, the channel has just hit nearly 40,000 views across the entire channel in March, which is up 41% from February. We also welcome 368 new subscribers. So if you’re new, welcome also a big thank you for the beautiful response to the recent vlogs that I’ve done, especially the one I posted on post-traumatic growth.
Bill Gasiamis 0:32
It clearly struck a chord, and I’ll definitely be exploring more topics like that in future videos. And just a quick reminder, if you’re enjoying the show, one of the easiest way to support it is by listening through the ads. It really does help keep the podcast going. If you haven’t already, you can pick up a copy of my book, The Unexpected Way That A Stroke Became The Best Thing That Happened, at Amazon, by typing my name into the Amazon search bar. Also at recoveryafterstroke.com/book.
Bill Gasiamis 1:44
Now today’s episode, I’m joined by Doug Mitchell, a stroke survivor who brings warmth, wisdom and honesty to the conversation. Doug opens up about the emotional and mental journey of recovery and what it’s been like learning to live differently after stroke. He also shares a powerful analogy that beautifully captures the process of becoming someone new. Let’s dive in. Doug Mitchell, welcome to the podcast.
Doug Mitchell 2:14
Thank you, Bill.
Doug Mitchell’s Stroke Experience
Bill Gasiamis 2:16
Thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Tell me a little bit about what happened to you.
Doug Mitchell 2:21
All right, so, we’re going to go on almost five years now. So, March 4, 2020. I thought that I was having a heart attack, actually, and I came home from where I sent out to go to work and or, and I was driving, and I kind of just felt weird that day, so I turned around halfway there, and came home, and my wife was working off our at her business, so she wasn’t gone yet when the morning, when I came back, and I called her and talked to her, and then I said she’s so she left. And so after she left, I went to the hospital, so I didn’t really expand on what was going on.
Doug Mitchell 3:07
So I went to the hospital. And when I got there, they did some tests and they said they came back, and they actually did a CAT scan and stuff. So they came back and they said “Well, I got some good news and some bad news for you.” I go, okay. He goes “What do you want to hear first?” I said, it doesn’t matter, you just tell me, what’s going on, “So well, I’ll tell you right now. You haven’t had a heart attack, but since your last MRI in June of last year you’ve had three strokes.” I say, okay, alright. So, alright.
Doug Mitchell 3:46
So that kind of gave, well, my wife found out and all this stuff when, when she was being told, that kind of gave her some relief of why I’ve changed, and why my mood changed and different aspects of me changed, and she could never figure it out. And I couldn’t figure it out because I never saw the changes. So, after I think about a year, I went in at first a bubble test my heart and to find out I had a hole in my heart. That’s what allowed the clots to get into my brain. So I had three clots in my brain that messed up three parts of my brain.
Doug Mitchell 4:34
So what happened is 90% of my deficits are cognitive, so I consider that an invisible stroke. So I have an invisible stroke, and so being 90% cognitive, and 10% of it is my dominant left hand fine motor skills. Now I didn’t find out about that, at until two years into my recovery, because I got into a writing course that was put on by a stroke survivor in British Columbia. And she started this writing course, and it’s June honkings, and it’s with the stroke of my pen, and she started this writing course.
Doug Mitchell 5:22
So what she does in this writing course is she gives us a certain thing to do, like a certain thing to write about every week so, and it all needs to be like three paragraphs or so. So the one that I wrote the I I wrote my story on was the phrase that she gave us was, how did I get here? So I wrote that, I wrote a story and that about empowering 2.0 and I’ll tell you a little bit how that goes, if that’s okay.
Bill Gasiamis 6:02
Yeah.
Doug Mitchell 6:03
So during my journey and going through all these, I’ll call myself a zoom junkie. I go to all kinds of support groups, through the March of Dimes and different different organizations from BC and all over, all over Canada, and in going through these courses, or not courses, but talk, talkings and conversations I always kept hearing in the first couple of years is, you gotta find your new me. I’m going you gotta find your new me.
Doug Mitchell 6:37
That doesn’t make any sense to me. And I could never figure out, what do you mean the newbie, I couldn’t figure it out, come to find out. And thinking about that, is that I was in denial for the first two years.
The Concept of “Embracing 2.0” Despite The Cognitive Fatigue
Doug Mitchell 6:47
I was in denial that I never had a stroke, I was in denial that I’m 57 years old, I didn’t have a stroke. All this I’m not, nothing’s wrong with me, I look fine. My brain was always a stroke survivor, had physical issues with walking or arms or or whatever, talking and so what happened is that in this writing course, with June, when I wrote this empowering, embracing 2.0, I really started thinking, okay, so, and I’ll go through it just real quick, and then maybe you might be able to put it in on the chat, in your in your broadcast about where that is.
Doug Mitchell 7:36
And they can find it on my YouTube page. But imagine yourself before your stroke, and this is a piece of paper, so look how pristine this piece of paper is it’s flat, it’s white. There’s no crinkles, no nothing in it. You’re perfect, you’re who you were, who you are before stroke. So everything’s going cool. If you’re having a good time, your life’s going great, everything’s fine. And then take that piece of paper and then crumple it up. Crumple it up into a ball, crumple it up tight as you can whatever.
Doug Mitchell 8:16
Just take that piece of paper and crumple it up. This right now, is your journey to a crumpled reality of 2.0 so this is a crumpaled reality of 2.0 so now take this piece of paper and try to unfold it and fold it so it’s flat. Try to unfold it sort flat, try to get it as flat as you can. Can’t get it flat, why can’t I get why can’t I get this flat? Feel the highs and the lows and everything in this and the lines and all that, and and realize to yourself and find out that you’re never going to go back to I’ll consider, I’ll just say my name, Doug 1.0 I’m never going to get back to Doug 1.0.
Doug Mitchell 9:17
I’ve had three sections of my brain that have been affected through the strokes, and I never can get back to this pristine piece of paper. I’ll never get back to this pristine, so I had to realize that, okay, I’m in denial still. Now I now I’m trying to talk myself out in now, and I’m saying, okay, so I have to now brace myself as Doug 2.0, so this is Doug 2.0 all wrinkled and all kinds of cracks and and everything. So I gotta figure out life now, and figuring out life actually was wasn’t that bad.
Doug Mitchell 9:57
Because I was involved, like, I say, in so many different conversation groups and things from March of Dimes, there were some other things that, like Alisa Barker from Vancouver, British Columbia, she had a conversation group on Tuesdays, and then she had a talk group on Thursdays, and that was people from all over Canada that it was involved in that. And she was very instrumental in my recovery and getting with stroke survivors and learning about what can be done out there.
Doug Mitchell 10:36
And so he you just have to, I don’t know, it’s just that 2.0 really brought it home to me, and it doesn’t. And I don’t want to be negative, and it doesn’t. I don’t want to sound negative. Some people might think it is, but when I say you’re not going to get back to one point, no, that doesn’t mean you can’t progress.
Bill Gasiamis 10:57
Let’s pause here before we continue with Doug’s powerful story, I want to take a moment to thank my Patreon supporters. Your generosity helps ensure that this podcast remains free and accessible for stroke survivors around the world. If you’d like to support the show and become part of the Recovery After Stroke Community, you can learn more at patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke. Now let’s get back to Doug and his honest reflections on adapting to executive function loss and embracing life as Doug 2.0.
Cognitive Fatigue After Stroke
Doug Mitchell 11:30
You can progress as long as much as you want from 2.0 you can keep going and going and going. You’re a new person, or you’re new you, and that could be with your wife having mood changes and different things like that I don’t see I had mood changes and I couldn’t see them, but my wife could see him, and like I said when I went to the hospital, and after we got home, and she said “You know about the mood changes and noticing them before I went in and into the hospital and stuff, I actually had to in recovery.”
Doug Mitchell 12:13
I had to actually get into my doctor even suggested to possibly going on some antidepressants, and I said “No, I don’t need any antidepressants.” He goes “Well, a lot of stroke survivors do need antidepressants because they do get down and stuff.” So he wanted to try it. So I tried a couple different I’m going to call them cocktails. And we got to the third cocktail, and it’s the one that’s been working for me now. So I feel good about that.
Bill Gasiamis 12:44
So did they fix the hole in the heart?
Doug Mitchell 12:46
Yes, I had my PFO fixed, it’s, I call it, they put a drywall screw in the hole in my heart. But, yeah, they just go out through the groin and stick a device through there, and it balloons out on both sides, and then your heart heals around it.
Bill Gasiamis 13:07
Interesting. You went from being quote, unquote normal and perfectly fine and healthy to being diagnosed with three strokes, a hole in the heart and needing surgery, and it’s pretty full on, if you’ve gone unscathed to you know, so to speak, for 20, for 57 years, and then all of a sudden you’re dealing with all these things, it could be a lot to handle in it sense that you’re you, but you’re a new, you are you that’s got some scars that you’re carrying with you now, that you weren’t carrying with you before, and those scars change the way that you work.
Bill Gasiamis 13:49
They change the way that things move and operate and your flow and all sorts of things, and you’ve got to come to terms with it, and you’ve got to heal and you’ve got to accept it, and you have to grapple with it, so it’s common, it’s a common occurrence. Also, denial is very common, I hear so many strokes of others refused to accept it and deny that they had a stroke, and I’m not sure what’s behind that, whether it’s about ego or whether it’s something else. Do you have a sense of what was behind the denial for you?
Doug Mitchell 14:36
It was ego Bill, it was ego. And I’m a man, and there’s no way I had a stroke and I’m not going to, I’m not going to say I had a stroke and and stuff like that. And so you come to the realization that, yeah, um, another big part too is finding out I wouldn’t be able to go back to work. That was a huge hit, huge hit. And I found that out after my long term disability, and my neurologist actually sent me to to get a I got, I wrote it down somewhere here, I always forget what it is called neuropsych assessment.
Doug Mitchell 15:20
And when they did this neuropsych assessment, it took like, six hours to go through the testing and stuff and to come to find out I when I did the testing, I came out of it and came home and told my wife, I said, I aced that, that was awesome. I did really great that she was “Yeah.” I said “Yeah, that was I did good.” come to find out, when they gave me the results, I failed miserably.
Doug Mitchell 15:45
I had basically, they told me I lost my executive function so I could not, you know, have a hard time problem solving stuff like that. I get overstimulated, really easy, overwhelmed and things like that I didn’t really acknowledge until after I was told that.
Bill Gasiamis 16:12
How long after the initial diagnosis, did you have this neuro psych assessment?
Doug Mitchell 16:18
I think my neuro psych was around a year and three quarters in, probably after, so probably almost 2022.
Bill Gasiamis 16:28
Okay, so executive function, I’ve just made a inquiry into church apt, says that it affects, it includes your working memory, your cognitive flexibility, flexible thinking, inhibitory control, self regulation. It helps with decision making, supports self control in emotional and behavioral responses, enhances organization and time management, aids in multitasking and prioritizing plays a role in self motivation and goal setting.
Bill Gasiamis 17:06
How executive function affected by stroke, and then basically those things get challenged after the stroke. For you specifically, do you have troubles with organizing things?
Doug Mitchell 17:21
Yes, very much. So I can actually tell you exactly what I want you to do and exactly what needs to be done to get something done, but for me to go do it, I can’t do it, it’s weird. It is totally weird. Well, I can tell you, you know, you gotta take this hammer, you gotta pick this nail up. You gotta swing the hammer on the nail, put the nail in the hole, stuff like that. But for me to go out and do it, I can’t do it. It’s weird.
Bill Gasiamis 17:47
It’s like a task initiation thing, you can initiate the task.
Doug Mitchell 17:50
Yeah, initiation.
Bill Gasiamis 17:53
So I get that too, not I don’t have executive function challenges like that are common. But when I’m fatigued or tired, when I’ve had a massive day, and this stuff that I know needs to be done, and it could be the easiest thing, just the ability to just go and do it, actually, it’s not but it is not there, like it is actually physically not there, it doesn’t exist, that part of me doesn’t exist. So you could drag me to do it, you could make me do it, you could you’re just not there.
Bill Gasiamis 18:32
It doesn’t exist. It’s like it’s never happened before, and I don’t know how to comprehend what even I know. So it’s like it’s even I know what needs to be done, like you said, but the ability to do a task like that doesn’t there’s no spot for it in my brain.
Bill Gasiamis 18:49
I’ve never done it before, according to my brain, and therefore I can’t get it done now, the next morning, when I’ve recovered and had a rest, etc, then there’s no thought process. But the night before, it was just, that’s it not going to happen. Yeah, it doesn’t matter how important it is. It doesn’t matter how necessary, complicated, easy, basic, just doesn’t it’s not going to happen.
Doug Mitchell 19:15
See, like, with me, I have to chunk things out. Yeah, I have to chunk things out little increments, like, let’s say I’m going to make soup or something. In the morning, I might chop celery and onions, and then I might go sit down, and then I’ll come out and do something else, and I’ll have to go sit down and just chunk everything out. And then when I’m done, I got everything all ready to go, so when it’s time to make it.
Doug Mitchell 19:40
Everything’s there, and I can go ahead and make it. Everything’s gotta be written out for me, where I before would do everything off, off the top of my head. I would never use a recipe, I would never write anything down. But it all has to get chunked out to get it done.
Bill Gasiamis 19:57
What kind of work were you doing?
Doug Mitchell 19:59
I was management at General Motors. So I was, yeah, it was a high stressful.
Bill Gasiamis 20:07
A lot of things happening at once. Have you noticed in the last few years, has there been any kind of improvement? Are you seeing some spots or some areas in the way that you operate where you can say “Oh, okay, that’s changed, or that’s improved, that’s different, or that’s better.”
Doug Mitchell 20:26
Yeah, a lot of it is like, I sit down now and I analyze and, like, I say, chomping things. So I analyze, I write things down, what I want to get done. So, like, let’s here’s my situation where, at the beginning of my journey, I would try to get way too much done. I would go way overboard, I could just try to chunk, chug, chug, chug, chug through, and then it would just destroy me. And I would, you know, I’d be like, done the next day because I was pushing, pushing, pushing.
Doug Mitchell 21:02
I’m at the point now I can do three things a day, three things that I want to get done for the next day. And that might change overnight. I might get up in the morning go “Okay, I’m not going to do those three things. I’ll do something else.” but three things that’s I know that’s my limit right now.
Bill Gasiamis 21:18
And do you have days where you think I’m wiped out, nothing’s getting done today “That’s it” and then all of a sudden, you find a little bit of a burst of energy, and then you can get things done.
Doug Mitchell 21:29
Yeah, for sure, yeah.
Bill Gasiamis 21:32
I remember traveling with my wife and telling her, do not organize anything for us for tomorrow, because I am wiped out, that’s it. I don’t want to have anything to do with anybody, I’m not going anywhere. And then I wake up in the morning and I said to her “Okay, so what are we doing today?” And she said “I thought we weren’t going anywhere today.” I said “Well, yesterday I definitely wasn’t going anywhere, but today, I slept well, and I feel up to it, so why don’t we squeeze some stuff in?”
Doug Mitchell 21:59
Yep, and my wife can just look at me, and she’ll say, Doug, you gotta go lay down. I mean, I she’ll just look at me, just look, just a quick look, and Doug, you need to go lay down. So she knows, just by looking at me that, hey, it’s, you’re done. So yeah, it’s funny how that stuff works.
Bill Gasiamis 22:19
How long do your naps need to take?
Doug Mitchell 22:24
Usually an hour, I’ll take a nap in the afternoon. So what happens is that I’ll usually have two meetings in the morning, like one at 10 o’clock and maybe one at 1 o’clock, and then, let’s say 2:30 I’ll take an hour nap, and then I’ll get up and and go the rest of my day, right? And I usually have meetings, like tonight, I got one at 8, and stuff like that. So, yeah, it’s like, go, go, go. So usually I’m going to say I usually have at least three meetings a day, so that takes time, right?
Bill Gasiamis 22:58
Yeah, it does. It takes energy as well, like brain power, the whole works. Your snooze? Is it like a proper snooze? Are you out cold? Are you just kind of resting there with your eyes closed? What type of a rest is it?
Doug Mitchell 23:14
I’m normally out cold. Very rarely do I just close my eyes and just lay there. I do meditation now, which I never thought I would do in my lifetime. There’s you asked me at 1.0 I would say, What are you talking about? I’m not going to meditate.
Bill Gasiamis 23:34
You definitely had changed Doug, you definitely.
Doug Mitchell 23:36
Yes, I have. Yeah, I do a couple of those a week. So, yeah, it’s definitely helps.
Bill Gasiamis 23:44
How does it help?
Doug Mitchell 23:47
I think it calms me down when I get overwhelmed and stuff. Let’s say we go to Costco or the grocery store or something like that. I can actually just kind of walk over to the side and do a breathing exercise or something, just to try to calm down. What’s really helped me, Bill is I actually got into somebody actually suggested these on one of the calls, they’re called “Loops” LOOPS, and they’re like an ear plug.
Doug Mitchell 24:27
And you use them to and it takes certain decibels out of the out certain decibels, out of what you’re hearing. And those help a lot. So like going to Costco, the grocery store, or somewhere where I know a busy restaurant, I’ll put those in and it helps immensely.
Bill Gasiamis 24:50
Yeah, the good thing about the loop is it just looks like a regular ear plug, and it’s nothing legit, like what people might use to listen to music for. Example, like a wireless one, but it’s actually got nothing to do with that. What it is, it just takes out certain frequencies, and you can adjust it on the side of the earpiece. You can decrease the amount of noise, but you can still hear properly and have a conversation with somebody, but it takes off that. What do we call it extra extra feedback, extra information that your brain doesn’t want to deal with or cope with.
Bill Gasiamis 25:28
So for people who are interested in loop just, literally just go to loop.com I think it is LOOP.com, they are called Loop Ear Buds. There’s a few different types, and I think the most they cost is $100 and then there’s a couple of different versions that cost less than that. And they are super helpful for decreasing fatigue. Mine actually in my house, inside the house, instead of in the studio. So I can’t show you what they look like, but definitely look into them.
Doug Mitchell 26:04
Yeah, the $100 ones, like the ones you have, the ones I have, have a three position dial on them that you can change the three different positions. So that’s the most expensive on the ones that we’ve got, but, yeah.
Bill Gasiamis 26:15
Extremely helpful, I might do actually a review video. I might do a video and put it on my channel and have people discover it, come across it, whatever, because they’re super helpful. And there’s such a small investment, and you get a very big bang for your buck. You know, if you’re somebody who’s missed out on going to sporting events because they’re too loud, there’s too much going on, they are perfect for that. If you want to go to a concert or an opera or something like that, and you’ve avoided it because it’s too overwhelming, they are perfect for that.
Bill Gasiamis 26:51
I used to kind of enjoy going to a Grand Prix, for example, in the Melbourne Grand Prix here, and there’s no way I could go and sit through a day at the Grand Prix now, with the cars going around for hours, it would just drive me insane. It would make it painful, and it would make it unenjoyable, there’d be no point being there. So I’m at that point where I could definitely put the loop ear plugs in and just go down there and then enjoy my day for a few hours, something that I definitely have found myself avoiding after the stroke.
Support Groups and Caregiver Involvement
Bill Gasiamis 27:26
I never went to the football here for many, many years because of it, and I avoided concerts and things like that. But now they’re now I’m 13 years out Doug, so there’s a bit of a difference there. I have recovered that ability to deal with some sounds in short stints, so I can go to a concert without my earplugs, for example, but it would be way better if I took them with me.
Doug Mitchell 27:54
I think another thing too, that I don’t know talking with you is one thing that stroke survivors need to know is that there’s caregiver groups out there, and caregiver groups are extremely important for your relationship in for your caregiver to understand your stroke journey. Because if you have, I’ll tell you something, going to these meetings, not I mean that stroke survivor meetings, you’re talking to people that understand you completely.
Doug Mitchell 28:37
The whole thing. It’s like a family you’re going to see 30 family members that day for an hour, right? And for the caregiver, my wife’s part of the caregiver group, and that helped her a lot, because we really didn’t have a big understanding of stroke and that and how it affects you, but that the caregiver group has helped her immensely.
Bill Gasiamis 29:08
Yeah, because she completely doesn’t understand you, but she completely understands the caregivers, and they completely understand her.
Doug Mitchell 29:15
Yeah, exactly it’s that’s the way it works.
Bill Gasiamis 29:19
So they can go there and talk about the challenges, the frustrations, their concerns, all those things. And they can have somebody go, yeah, that’s normal, like we’re doing, we’re normalizing certain things. And then you can that kind of takes a bit of the weight off it. It makes it feel a little lighter, and you’ve shared it to other people, and they’ve given you some advice, and they’ve clued you into things that you didn’t know you needed to know about being a caregiver and and that’s the thing about stroke support groups, same thing.
Bill Gasiamis 29:52
And because I’m also quite like you, in that you know need to have people, to talk to about. I created a podcast because the caregiver, sorry, the support groups were few and far between when I was starting to go through this, and I thought “Oh, well, I’ll just invite people on to a show, and we’ll talk about it once or twice a week, every week from now on.” And that’s my version of it.
Doug Mitchell 30:20
Yeah, it’s incredible that you did this. And that’s one of the one of the benefits, if you want to say it’s a benefit of COVID, is that people got into, you know, online things. So for March of Dimes to get online and do support online was huge. SR ABC out of British Columbia doing their online stuff, all these different organizations that do it is, I don’t know what I would done if I didn’t have virtual my whole recovery was virtual. I went, my reminder is that March of 2020 was shut down. So my recovery was all done virtually from Parkway density or Parkway recovery.
Doug Mitchell 31:09
And I had a team of seven people, and they they called me, not all seven every day, but a certain amount would call me every day and talk about different things, of PT and OT and and stuff like that, nurse and it was kind of tough at the beginning, because I didn’t think I would want to be on on video. I didn’t think I’d want to talk to somebody at an iPad, just look at them and talk, but now I love it. And it’s really, it’s been instrumental, because I don’t know what I would have done without the support of all these different channels.
Bill Gasiamis 31:49
It’s so efficient as well, right? The one thing that I struggled with was finding the time to go to three appointments of rehab in 2015 when I had done outpatient rehab after my brain surgery. Man, that was such a tough thing to do, because they were three different appointments on three different days, and I had to get there, and because my wife was working, and I was quite independent. By then, I wasn’t driving, but I was quite independent. I would have to, you know, get public transport, and that will take around an hour or so to get there.
Bill Gasiamis 32:26
Then I would have an hour’s session, and then I will take an hour to get back home, and then it was like, my god, there’s one, and then I’m pooped at the end of it, and then there’s one entire day gone just for one hour of rehab, and that happened three days a week, and then it was physical rehab. So it’s important that I was there. However, the other part of rehab, you know, the other part that’s important, this conversation, part of it, this talking, part of it, the efficiency of just being able to wake up, sit down at a chair, switch on a computer and do that.
Bill Gasiamis 33:03
I think, is just it’s the most amazing thing we live in, the most amazing times. It’s just brilliant that I’m talking to you in Canada and we’re seeing each other. I mean, that’s just ridiculous. I just can’t get my head around it. And and our community, our community is all over the world. It is actually a community, even though we can’t do the touchy feely huggy stuff face to face, because the people that follow the podcast interact with it on YouTube. They leave comments, they share they get responses from me.
Bill Gasiamis 33:40
We share information, we like each other’s comments, or we respond to each other’s comments, and it’s like that’s a proper community. It never existed, say, before 2012 when I when all of my journeys started, it just didn’t exist. And I was stuck because a lot of the support groups that we went to in the beginning that I went to, a few of them, people were so unwell, they couldn’t turn up a lot of the time. And then what do you do? You go to a support group and only two out of the 10 people turned up. It’s kind of not the same.
Doug Mitchell 34:19
Yeah, we’re London’s about 490,000 people. It’s the number one, one of the number one stroke hospitals, the University Hospital in London, and we have for our in person meeting once a month, second Thursday of every month, we have six or seven people that go and out of those six or seven people, I’m probably one of the oldest, not the oldest in age, but the oldest in recovery five years. It’s crazy.
Doug Mitchell 35:05
There’s 1000s of people in London that have had strokes, yeah, and why aren’t they involved in a lot of these, like even the in person groups. It’s just that’s crazy, it just It blows my mind.
Rebuilding After Stroke And Cognitive Fatigue: Support, Awareness, and Recovery
Bill Gasiamis 35:19
Do you think a lot of people are doing it on their own, or maybe have, you know, like, ego getting in the way, all that type of thing not to attend. Or do you think it’s something to do with that, as well as what stroke does to people?
Doug Mitchell 35:35
Well, you think about how many people are struggling out there, that may have not gotten any support or the a pamphlet or something to say this is available here. You can get this here. It’s, I don’t know right now, since COVID London hasn’t had the caregiver or the support that you can go in the hospital and talk to stroke survivors, so they haven’t had that going yet. And they’re starting, they’re going to get it going, supposedly, again.
Doug Mitchell 36:12
But that’s what I would like to see go and see, is, what are the survivors getting when they leave the hospital. What kind of information are they getting? I know if I got a book of a pamphlet of information leaving the hospital, I probably wouldn’t even have looked at it, be honest with you, but, and that’s possibly, that’s what they haven’t done either I don’t know what they’re getting.
Bill Gasiamis 36:39
And maybe also maybe they’re suffering in silence, maybe they’re struggling alone, and they don’t know. And hopefully they come across an interview like this and makes them think about the possibility of not suffering in silence and reaching out. People are all always willing to help them, and there’s so many people willing to help in the hospitals in Australia, the Stroke Foundation has a goal to reach 85% of the people that turn up to hospital with stroke symptoms or their family members.
Bill Gasiamis 37:16
Reach them with a pamphlet, a booklet that says, now you’ve had a stroke, you know what’s next type of thing? And they’re hoping to get to 85% of the people that are hospitalized for a stroke. But that’s a big ask, because yes, the reality of stroke is different for everybody, and also they’re relying on, I think they’re relying on part of the medical team to go grab that brochure from the cupboard and take it out and present it and explain it and go through it. But that is on their to do list.
Bill Gasiamis 37:55
They’re definitely looking at how they can reach more stroke survivors and let them know about the support that exists because they’ve been around for about 27 years or so, and they’re trying to improve outcomes, and that’s one of the ways they figure, if we can start at the very beginning of the journey, that’d be a lot easier.
Doug Mitchell 38:17
Now in Australia, do you guys have a March of Dimes. Is March of Dimes prevalent and in Australia, or do they have a program? Or is there a program in Australia that would be like a program like March of Dimes, like, we have to have a lot of different supports for stroke survivors?
Bill Gasiamis 38:36
No, there isn’t at all. The only organization is the Stroke Foundation and they have some programs. They have some support, but there’s a lot of local support nonprofits that help where they can, and they’re fragmented. They’re all over the place. But I think what’s good about them being fragmented is that they serve the need where the need is. And although the Stroke Foundation has reach in most of Australia, it’s still not fully funded. It’s not funded enough to be able to provide services. It relies on donations, and also some government funding.
Bill Gasiamis 39:19
And government funding has been decreasing, especially since COVID and all that stuff that we’ve been through.
Doug Mitchell 39:26
Fair enough.
Bill Gasiamis 39:27
Yeah, so it’s quite a it’s quite a challenge. Now, March of Dimes has so many by the looks, I think, so many different aspects to it is it? Tell me a little bit about it. What is it long? What is it like?
Doug Mitchell 39:46
Well, for the stroke aspect of it, March of Dimes started years and years ago for polio, and I don’t know when exactly they got into the stroke cost support, but they have all kinds of different like, I say the different. They have aphasia groups for aphasia, they have musical group things. They got meditations, they have exercise, chair exercise and stuff like that. There’s a multitude of things that they have that they endorse, to try to get people involved in and to try to help them, help them recover. Yeah, they’re very good.
Bill Gasiamis 40:34
The Stroke March of Dimes page is afterstroke.ca, for Canada, and it’s got resources, get involved. Volunteer with us, get support, support groups, online programs, and then refer, allows healthcare providers to refer a patient to that organization for support. So it sounds like it’s got quite a good level of support for stroke survivors, which is really cool. It’s basically what Stroke Foundation does, but it is not part of a larger organization. Is just specifically tailored for stroke survivors. It started off as a stroke support group.
Doug Mitchell 41:25
I was going to say that a lot of people, and this is what I got out of like these programs too, is that it’s kind of funny, because you’ll talk to people and people like with aphasia and stuff like, I have aphasia, but I don’t really have the speaking part of it. I have the word finding and stuff like that aspect of it. But you’ll hear people on these calls, and they’re talking and and like, let’s say six, seven months later, you’ll say, man, you’re talking great, you know. And they’ll go, no, I’m not. And they don’t see it, they don’t see it.
Doug Mitchell 42:00
So what you need to do is, what needs to be done is, if you have a deficit and you don’t like anything, it doesn’t matter what it is, even the the minute little improvement is an improvement. But have the loved one or a caregiver or somebody in your family videotape you, and this video tape you for maybe to a minute or two, and then maybe three months later down the road, did it tape you again, and have you see them both? You may see a change.
Doug Mitchell 42:30
You may not see a change, but I’m going to almost guarantee you’re going to see something that’s changed. So you can keep doing that and see your progress and and that is a real eye opener for a lot of people.
Bill Gasiamis 42:44
It helps to demonstrate improvement and make you feel like you’re actually on the path to recovery and you’re improving and things are getting better. That’s really important to know that things are improving, and we’re so hard on ourselves. Most people are really hard on themselves, and as a stroke survivor, you need to give yourself a little bit more grace. It doesn’t need to be so much perfection and going after immaculate kind of sentences and all that type of stuff, it’s not coming.
Bill Gasiamis 43:15
It’s not coming, as long as it’s improving, and you can see that will give you a little bit of a boost and make you feel a little better about how things are progressing, I love that. That is a great comment. I’m curious, is all the support groups that you attend and those things? Are they your counseling? Is that kind of, have you do you go and see a counselor? Have you seen a counselor about any of this stuff, or have you kind of used the support groups to play that role or to take over from there?
Doug Mitchell 43:54
Yeah, I’ve never seen a therapist or anything like that, support groups are my therapy. Yeah, they’re my therapy, I learned the most out of those groups that you know I and it’s, and it’s almost like every session, you learn something. It either you learn something about the person that’s talking or you learn something about the stroke journey that you never knew about before. And yeah, it’s that’s, I use it as a, I use that as a my therapy, I believe, and I try to help other people out too, right?
Doug Mitchell 44:27
I mean, we have people Bill, we have people that are in those meetings that are 30 year stroke survivors. And I’m just like 30 year stroke surviving, they’re still coming to these meetings. Well, let’s say they didn’t start till 2020 but they’re coming to these meetings, and it’s like 30 years in, and you’re coming to these meetings and it’s just, it blows it, just yeah, just I just go, wow.
Bill Gasiamis 44:53
Strokes a gift that keeps on giving, though. Doug, like, yeah, it never leaves you once it’s come and it’s done its thing. And, yeah, it never goes away. You don’t wake up in the morning one day and “Oh, my legs back, or everything is back.” That’s the thing, it improves and it changes. And what I’m finding is, in the last sort of six months, my deficits on my left side have changed, and they’re what they are is they’re more noticeable now, not that I wasn’t noticing them or paying attention to them before they’re playing up a little more often.
Bill Gasiamis 45:27
And they’re letting me know, you know, your leg is not right, your arm is not right, your muscles are tight. It’s doing it more often, your shoulder is a little bit not right. But it never entered my mind as often as it does these days, and I’m not overthinking it like it physically needs more rehab, so I’ll go and get a massage more often than I used to, because it needs, I need some help to release it all along my back and down my left side and my chest and all that kind of stuff. It’s all over the place and and it hasn’t been so that’s the thing about stroke.
Bill Gasiamis 46:03
Like it bugs you. It can bug you all the time, and it’s like, okay, you need to deal with it. If you don’t expel that energy or comprehend it or find another way or focus on something else, like it can get you down. So I think it’s really important that people seek out ongoing support of some sort, and from people who are equipped to help you, bitching and moaning to family member who doesn’t really care or can’t support you or doesn’t know how to is probably not the right way to go about it.
Bill Gasiamis 46:39
It’s best that you talk to those people about the things that they can handle, and then you’re chatting to somebody else that understands you and what you’re going through for the stroke stuff. How else do you occupy your time? Were you into sports and any of that type of thing. Did you do anything physical that you’re not doing anymore?
Personal Growth and New Interests
Doug Mitchell 47:07
Watching sports, I did a lot of that. I love watching sports. I do a lot of smoking, I smoke meats, so barbecue and stuff like that. And since the stroke I’ve taken up sour bread, dough making, so made my own starter, all that stuff. So that goes on a little bit and with my dominant left hand not being able to write.
Doug Mitchell 47:40
When I found that out two years in my wife and I actually went and found and I know one of these, call was brought to my attention that, like, go to the dollar store and grab some like, three year old or like, third grade writing books and trace the letters and do stuff like that, and get, like, adult coloring book and color and try to stay in between the lines that helped really a lot with the fine motor skills.
Doug Mitchell 48:12
And I can somewhat right now that it doesn’t look like a doctor’s signature or a doctor’s writing. I can, because before I could write notes and the next day, go look at it and go, What the hell is that? I wouldn’t know. I would not know what was there. And I don’t. I was definitely saying something, but I don’t know what it was.
Bill Gasiamis 48:32
And you type on the keyboard with your left hand, does that work?
Doug Mitchell 48:35
Yeah, no, I can type and everything like that, it’s just weird. It’s just the writing part of it. It’s, yeah, I don’t know.
Bill Gasiamis 48:42
Yeah, maybe it’s a type of aphasia.
Doug Mitchell 48:44
Typing is fine. Most of the things I do with is on the iPad, so it’s just on a, it’s not like a typing on a keyboard of a computer. Basically, it’s finger pointing.
Bill Gasiamis 48:58
Yeah, right. Okay, well, single finger would the writing be a part of the aphasia?
Doug Mitchell 49:05
I’m not positive Bill, how that works and how that comes off, comes about. It could be, I just chalk it up to be in part of the stroke that took, like, a little bit of fine motor skills away from my dominant hand. Like, yeah, I don’t know, it’s weird.
Bill Gasiamis 49:24
Yeah, but you found that there’s been an improvement in that space as well.
Doug Mitchell 49:27
Yeah, there’s been improvement. Like, at the beginning, the first couple years, I really like eating in that my hand would shake and stuff like that, almost like I had Parkinson’s disease or something like that. But that’s all went away pretty much now, and yeah, so I don’t know.
Bill Gasiamis 49:44
And what about the weather? I know Canada can be cold, impact only differently.
Doug Mitchell 49:50
I don’t think so. Yes, it has, I could wear shorts all year long. And I get cold now, easier, a lot easier since the stroke. Yeah, I get cold a lot easier now. So that that’s the one thing that I notice, is the cold.
Bill Gasiamis 50:15
You can wear cool, you could wear shorts all year round. So even in Canada, when you’re going about your business.
Doug Mitchell 50:22
I would snow blow in shorts, Bill.
Bill Gasiamis 50:25
Man.
Doug Mitchell 50:29
Neighbors would laugh. They’d have fun with it, but yeah, I would snow blow it short time.
Bill Gasiamis 50:33
Yeah, that’s insane. I can’t deal with the cold, and the cold bothers me so much more than it used to, and it used to bother me a lot, I just never liked it. And I always love summer, and people in summer, we get 100 more than 100 degrees, days on a regular basis here, 40 degrees, 38 degrees Celsius, you know, 36 degrees Celsius. And everyone else around me is just not coping. And I’m like “Bring it on.” Like the hotter, the better. As long as I get some sleep at night, I don’t mind how hot it is.
Bill Gasiamis 51:10
Of course, I don’t mind the relief of coming inside to an air conditioning, air conditioned room. Every so often I do, but it doesn’t get me down. Like winter gets me down. I even these days since the stroke, I get those winter blues that people talk about, when there’s not enough sun in the sky, when there’s not enough hours of daylight, and you’re probably lacking, I’m not sure, all the things that the sun allows you to experience. And I really get blue, and it just makes me feel more blue than ever before. And I noticed the pattern, especially in the last two or three years.
Bill Gasiamis 51:47
And during COVID, I think I had, like, lots of reasons to feel that way. But during COVID Melbourne lockdowns, we were in lockdown for, you know, the best part of two and a half years. So, I was a really difficult person to be around in winter, and I couldn’t wait for those sunny days. I’d just go out, spend all day outside, and then wait, waited for the shortest day of the year to come around and be done with it, the winter solstice, and then just be going, we had two extra minutes of sun.
Doug Mitchell 52:32
Yes, the best, yeah.
Bill Gasiamis 52:33
And counting. Like, I’m finding myself doing weird stuff like that and now I’m noticing we’re in the last month of summer, and I’m noticing that the Nightfall used to be at around 9pm and now it’s got down to about 20 past eight, and now it’s starting to shrink, and at the end of next month, daylight savings is going to kick in. So we’re going to lose an hour of daylight. And I was thinking about it yesterday. I’m going to be putting the blinds down at night in the house. I’m going to be putting them down at seven o’clock in a month.
Doug Mitchell 53:14
In two weeks, we go daylight savings time, so we’re going to get, it’s going to get lighter at night. So it’s that’s going to be good. It’s just, it’s so weird, like, Bill’s in the future. Right now, I’m talking in the future because Bill’s in Friday now, right? I’m just talking my wife’s in here too. So, yeah, it’s, that’s gonna be good.
Family and Social Support
Bill Gasiamis 53:40
They’re the things that occupy my time. I didn’t realize how important it is to me until after the stroke, and how much the weather, the temperature, the time, the daylight, how it all does actually impact me, and I need to be aware of it, especially in winter, when I get a little bit down, a little bit blue. So what is the family situation like, how many of you in the house? Who else went along this journey with you? Other than your wife.
Doug Mitchell 54:13
Just me and my wife, Tracy, she’s sitting here, just us. We have no kids, been married for 10 years. Yeah, that’s just been us. And then she when I had my stroke, basically, she was told that she they came to work from home then, and they never got they never went back. So she’s been working from home now for the whole time. So that was good too, to have somebody in the house, and that’s what that really helped a lot, too.
Bill Gasiamis 54:57
So you kind of had a bit of like, a really good run afterwards, every things seem to line up really well for you.
Doug Mitchell 55:08
Yeah, for sure, very lucky. Yeah, that’s 24/7.
Bill Gasiamis 55:14
Yeah, that’s a blessing. So, are you a spiritual, religious man? Did you have any of those types of journeys, or did you contemplate that where you’ve never contemplated it before?
Doug Mitchell 55:33
Actually, no, I have not. It’s kind of funny, because I do think about it at times. There’s when I was a youngster, young kid, I was an altar boy and all that stuff in Episcopal Church and things like that. And I did that, I think, until I was a sophomore in high school. So probably from grade 5 till I was a sophomore in high school. So I go with my mom, and it was just basically me and my mom, my brother and my sister really didn’t go very often. And we go to church and do that kind of stuff, but no, I didn’t. I never really got into that aspect of it again.
Bill Gasiamis 56:14
Did you have any type of existential crisis or anything like that when you finally, you know at 57 well, just after 57 accepted that you went through this thing. Did you contemplate mortality, or any of those things?
Doug Mitchell 56:31
No, not really, because I think with myself, Bill, is that I know why I had the stroke, supposedly, the hole in the heart, so they plugged the hole, and supposedly that’s going to take care of everything. I can have a stroke any other way, I can still have a stroke. I know that I can still have a stroke, but I would, I could say “Okay, it’s not my fault.” The stroke wasn’t my fault, there’s no whine. It was a hole in my heart that allowed the thoughts to get in my brain. It wasn’t something that I did to myself, so that’s kind of how I got through that, I think.
Bill Gasiamis 57:11
Yeah, you seem like a no nonsense, mild mannered kind of guy. Just goes about business, what sounds like you’re a problem solver. Look for solutions rather than focus on the problems.
Doug Mitchell 57:22
Yeah.
Bill Gasiamis 57:24
It seems to be holding you in good stead, there definitely seems to be holding you in good stead, and that’s great. You know that you’ve been able to find support that you need. You’ve been able to resolve the cause of the stroke, which is great. You’ve been able to find a way to go about business now, at home and elsewhere, and that you’re noticing that things are improving. Your analogy is pretty profound, the fact that you know you spoke about that piece of paper, crinkled it up, and then you open it up and it’s still the same piece of paper, but it just looks different.
Bill Gasiamis 58:03
And the crinkles kind of never go. That’s a really good way to to kind of analyze your situation and accept the changes that have occurred. And maybe, and it seems like these changes a little bit more profound, perhaps, than any other changes that you’ve gone through in your in your life. And have you had like this type of a contemplative opportunity on any other changes that you’ve been through in your life up until the age of 57, did you sort of sit and ponder anything like you have in this situation?
Doug Mitchell 58:45
No, I didn’t, I never did. No, this was a really, and, like I said, finding the new me. And it’s just like I cannot understand what you guys are even talking about. But when I got it into the 2.0, that really put it in at that, threw it in my face that, okay, this is what’s going on.
Doug Mitchell 59:08
And, like you say, the analogy with when you have that paper folded out with all the wrinkles and all that stuff in it, that really, that really works well with groups and stuff like that, because they can see it and they can feel it and stuff like that. So it’s kind of profound on how it how it affects different people.
Bill Gasiamis 59:33
The Doug Mitchell paper analogy, I’m going to definitely refer back to that one often, I think.
Doug Mitchell 59:40
It embraces 2.0.
Bill Gasiamis 59:42
Yeah, it says so much in such a quick, succinct and precise way, both visually and audibly. It just says so much, and it really makes sense. It does describe me to an extent as well. So yes, and yeah, I love the idea of being able to share that with people and bridging that gap really effectively and quickly, and then allowing that person to just actually have a physical representation of that by taking that paper with them, if they choose to, and then using that to explain it to other people as well, so that other people know what happened.
Bill Gasiamis 1:00:25
You know that something has happened. Does it give you a greater insight into what other people are facing? Were you oblivious to other people’s perils, like I was before stroke? Or were you kind of “Oh, okay, I see what it was like for some other people that I’d come across in the past.”
Doug Mitchell 1:00:47
Before stroke, no. I wouldn’t even thought anything till after I had the stroke, and then I could see what it’s done, and how people are handling it and things like that, is really, you really have a different aspect on life after you’ve had a stroke, when, number one, you lived. That’s number one, you lived, okay, there’s so many people out there that die and have a stroke and die, yeah, so you lived.
Doug Mitchell 1:01:19
So that’s one good thing, and the other ones are that you can improve. It’s a pretty simple situation, that you can go out there and improve and be Doug 2.0 and be a very well rounded Doug 2.0 you just gotta have the faith, I guess the faith to accept, right? You gotta accept, you can’t be in Durham. I’ll tell you that.
Bill Gasiamis 1:01:50
I love the fact that you said faith. I mean, it’s still applicable, that word it’s not always needs, doesn’t always need to be associated with religion and religious faith, but as a concept, faith is, I think, is bigger than religion or religious faith, because we all have faith, whether you’re aware religious or not, and you have faith driving down the road that the guy’s going to stay on the side of the road, that he needs to stay on right if you didn’t, you couldn’t go anywhere. You have faith that you’re going to walk out of your house and somebody’s not going to come out and just attack you.
Bill Gasiamis 1:02:27
I know it happens from time to time, but the majority of the time you need to have faith in something. The religious faith is also an extension of that I believe and and perhaps came after just generalized faith. I’m thinking back in the day when perhaps, you know, Neanderthals existed and there was no religion. They even may not have known about the word faith and understood it the way that we understand it.
Reflections on Life After Stroke And Cognitive Fatigue
Bill Gasiamis 1:02:54
But they also practiced faith. You know, they woke up in the morning and they took their tools and they went to source food and bring it back for their family, and they had faith that they would be able to carry out those tasks. So, yeah, faith, it’s a good word, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be religious faith, although some people find religious face. Faith really helpful after an existential crisis like a stroke, which I totally get, like, no problem at all. What’s been the hardest thing about stroke for you though?
Doug Mitchell 1:03:38
One of the hardest things was not being able to go back to work, that was huge. That was huge, and that was it was like hitting your head against the brick wall when they came back after that assessment and said that I failed it miserably, and that I had, I lost my executive function. So then going through and listening to what you said about executive function through AI, everything that you said is my deficits, everything, it’s just my wife sitting over there going, yes, and yeah, it’s those are my deficits.
Doug Mitchell 1:04:23
And in, I guess, I don’t know, I guess losing that the working aspect of life, and then trying to figure out what you’re going to do, to try to fill your days up and stuff like that. So my mind is basically support groups and helping other people get better and try to support those as much as I can. And yeah, and I enjoy doing that. That’s good work.
Bill Gasiamis 1:05:02
Yeah, it is. That fills the gap really well. What has stroke taught you?
Doug Mitchell 1:05:13
It’s taught me to be kind to myself, and it’s taught me I can accept to do different things like meditation and different things like that, that I would have never, ever thought of doing thought and even writing, getting in that writing course and doing the writing I would never, ever think about that. I would never have thought that Doug would be a writer. And, yeah, I enjoy it. It’s just stuff that you just, you didn’t think you’d enjoy, but you enjoy it. So there’s things that can happen that can be different, for sure.
Bill Gasiamis 1:05:57
You’re so stereotypical. I mean, you’re exactly like the majority of the blokes that I’ve spoken to that go through stroke and realize “Ah, you can meditate.” It’s not a city sport you know, to meditate. It’s like, it’s okay. And that was me, that was me. Podcast, meditation, not smoking or drinking anymore, writing a book, all these weird things that before 37 year old Bill that didn’t even cross my path, they weren’t even like a blip in the radar.
Bill Gasiamis 1:06:37
There was no chance that I was going to be doing any of those stuff, frowned upon, that stuff, like, I wasn’t terrible at towards other people about it, but kind of thought that would be strange and weird and all that kind of stuff. I have no idea why I even thought those things. And then all of a sudden, everything was a possibility for me. And it’s like, how is all this stuff a possibility now, but it wasn’t before?
Doug Mitchell 1:07:05
Yeah, for sure.
Bill Gasiamis 1:07:07
But it’s done the same thing for me. It’s allowed me to kind of just go, okay, there’s more to the world than just the same stuff you’ve done for the last 20 years solid. Yeah, you can do something else, experience something different. What would you like to say to people who are listening and watching that are just starting their journey? Perhaps, or, like you said, have also been through 30 years of stroke recovery and just coming across the first podcast, for example maybe.
Doug Mitchell 1:07:43
I would say, try to join a group, if you could. And try to put yourself, be kind to yourself, for one. Number two, work hard at getting better on on different aspects of your deficiencies and stuff like that. It’s kind of sad that like yourselves in Australia, and I don’t know the UK, and all these other different places that are going to be watching us don’t have the support groups that we do. It’s it really, it kind of hurts me to hear that you guys don’t have that support.
Doug Mitchell 1:08:30
But, yeah, just number one, don’t be in denial. Number two, know that you can improve. Number three, there’s all kinds of stuff out there in the world that you can do now that you can grab a hold of and take the bull by the horns and go after it right. There’s no ending of what you can do so and like I said “Bill and I are proof of that.” And check out embracing 2.0, and hopefully that will help you realize that. There’s a good life out there to be had.
Bill Gasiamis 1:09:16
Yeah, on that note, Doug, thank you so much for reaching out and joining in the podcast.
Doug Mitchell 1:09:22
I appreciate it, Bill, thanks for your time.
Final Thoughts and Advice
Bill Gasiamis 1:09:25
Well, that wraps up an incredible, moving episode with Doug Mitchell. His story is a powerful reminder that not all stroke challenges are visible, and that executive function loss can change everything about how we move through the world. Doug’s willingness to talk about the hard stuff, denial, overwhelm, cognitive struggles and identity loss make this episode especially meaningful. And his message about embracing change, being kind to yourself and finding community through support groups is something I hope resonates with you as much as it did with me.
Bill Gasiamis 1:10:00
If you want to revisit Doug’s crumpled paper analogy to learn more about his project, embracing 2.0 you’ll find links in the show notes. Before we go, I want to remind you once more about my book, The Unexpected Way That A Stroke Became The Best Thing That Happened. If Doug’s story hit home for you, there’s more like it in the book, stories about growth, resilience and rediscovering purpose after stroke, you can find it on Amazon or at recoveryfterstroke.com/book.
Bill Gasiamis 1:10:30
And I want to leave you with this, just recently, someone left a comment on YouTube saying they were listening to this podcast from their hospital bed having just been diagnosed with a stroke that hit me really hard. It’s a powerful reminder of why we do this, why these stories matter, and how important it is to feel supported and understood, not alone, especially at the beginning of such a life changing journey.
Bill Gasiamis 1:10:59
If today’s episode inspired you, please consider leaving a five star review on Spotify or iTunes, or liking and commenting if you’re watching on YouTube, your engagement helps this content reach more people. People like that stroke survivor in the hospital bed who just needed to hear that there’s hope on the other side. Thank you again for being here. I’ll catch you in the next episode.
Intro 1:11:25
Importantly, we present many podcasts designed to give you an insight and understanding into the experiences of other individuals. Opinions and treatment protocols discussed during any podcast are the individual’s own experience, and we do not necessarily share the same opinion, nor do we recommend any treatment protocol discussed all content on this website and any linked blog, podcast or video material controlled this website or content is created and produced for information or purposes only and is largely based on the personal experience of Bill Gasiamis.
Intro 1:11:55
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Intro 1:12:20
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Intro 1:12:46
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The post Understanding Cognitive Fatigue After Stroke: Doug’s Journey to Doug 2.0 appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.
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