RENAISSANCE - Post Brain Haemorrhage

Few years ago at our   Acutouch   treatment we made the acquaintance of a wonderful mother-son duo.   Rudra, the boy was all cuteness and Kavita, his mother was friendly and resourceful.   Places like these are great treasure troves for information on different treatments and doctors. Kavita highly recommended Dr. Manik Hiranandani who runs an alternative treatment clinic, which is called just that - "The Clinic", at Malakkara in Kerala.  He uses a combination of treatments, but the main focus seems to be   Cranio-Sacral   therapy. After our misadventure with the  Varma treatment  during our Kerala stay, Dr. Hiranandani seemed worth pursuing.  Given his hectic schedule and our inability to take our father to his clinic just for a consult, we scheduled a meeting at a rather unconventional place -  the meeting was outside a bakery on the highway that was taking the Doctor from Ernakulam airport to Malakkara. The D...

Caregiver Support Group by smeiyappan Early this year Mr. Ravi from Pain and Stroke Rehab Center called to tell me about one Ms. Rama Murali who wants to start a support group for caregivers.   The call made me jubiliant as it had been my great desire to have or start such a group in Chennai. Sometimes the promise of something is greater than what it ends up offering, thankfully it wasn't the case this time.   Following a good conversation on the phone, Rama and I soon met up.   She was passionate and persistent about the support group.  Had been working with IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), Madras, to develop a communications App for caregivers and had come with the name Care. Connect. Community CARE3 (read CARE cube) for the group. She had put in a lot of work hunting for families, spending time with them and drafting objectives of the group.  When we met she was yet to have her first meeting.  Now the group has had over 6 - 7 mont...

                                                                Source: Planetthrive.com  If one were to take a survey of the number of labs in Chennai, the city of our residence, a mindboggling but unsurprising number would show up.    In our 5 months at Apollo Specialty Hospital (ASH) lab tests made up almost one-fourth of the mammoth bill.  As with many things we realized there is Apollo, and then there is rest of the medical world.   Apparently their equipments and diagnostic procedures are cutting edge, a line of reasoning used to justify almost double the cost of tests done elsewhere.    Once out of Apollo it was surely a tough act to follow for some of the specialized test.  But for the routine ones - after two years, various labs and multiple tests I have a...

Brain is constantly changing by forming and even growing new neural connections.   This inherent malleability is called neuroplasticity.   Training, experience and environmental factors can help rearrange the brain.  So we necessarily don’t die with the brain we are born with.     ‘Practice makes a man perfect’, and similar other sayings were in fact alluding to Neuroplasticity.  We know this when we practice an instrument, a language or any skill for that matter.   These days since I breathe Neuro plasticity, its conscious application is the obvious next step.  I’ve had the perfect opportunity to practice this when we get poorly trained and poorly trainable nurses.    Some of these nurses amaze me with their limited knowledge of nursing.   From ignorance about a Trach tube or a PEG feed, they are clueless about basic care giving like changing diaper, giving bath and changing sheets for a pers...

I love this picture of brain from the National Geographic. Read this piece on brain by them  Brain, Brain Information, Facts, News, Photos -- National Geographic .  Lovely interactive pictures.   While looking at the pictures, remember that it is our father's left fronto-parieto-temporal lobe which is affected.  So was his ganglio-capsular region , but this cannot be seen in the picture. Excerpt from the piece - "Making sense of the brain's mind-boggling complexity isn't easy. What we do know is that it's the organ that makes us human, giving people the capacity for art, language, moral judgments, and rational thought. It's also responsible for each individual's personality, memories, movements, and how we sense the world. All this comes from a jellylike mass of fat and protein weighing about 3 pounds (1.4 kilograms). It is, nevertheless, one of the body's biggest organs, consisting of some 100 billion nerve cells that not only put togethe...

Visiting Bangalore this weekend made me stop at the office of the Spandana Public Trust.   This is the organization that has provided us with two amazing live-in nurses since we got our father home.    Having spoken to them only over phone, thought best to put faces to the empathetic voices answering our calls.  Ms. Sunanda and Ms. Rathna, who always field the calls, were at the office on the crisp and sunny morning when I walked in to Spandana.   The office is a flat in an apartment building located at a quiet and affluent neighborhood of Koramangala.  There were some nurses waiting in the outer office looking for work.  Walls in the waiting area were filled with motivational posters.  Got couple of ideas on what it takes to be successful.  There were Spandana trained nurses sitting in another room waiting to be placed.  In a smaller room past all these room, both the ladies sat with a mobile and a landline each that r...

In July my sister and I went to an expo on Siddha Medicine at the Government Siddha Medical College, which is some 10 minutes away from our house.  This huge government teaching hospital has an array of alternate medicine – Siddha, Ayurveda, Unnni, Homeopathy and Magnet Therepy.   Although this seemed like a treasure trove of resource, we had little clue where to start.  Not knowing anyone who practiced at the hospital, or anyone who knew someone practicing there, we never approached the hospital.  Always looked at it from outside and strategized on how to use it.  This expo turned out to be a good opportunity.   The number of medicine not just for illness, but for a healthy lifestyle is tremendous.   I think we got a breakthrough for one of the treatments at the hospital.  It has been a month since we started it.  The results have been promising thus far.  Will write more when there is something definite.  ...

In the first month after we got our father home, we were persistently looking for alternate treatments to help heal him.    One possibility that seemed to work, atleast in some ways was Acupuncture .    Literature available on it is a galore, so are the practicing acupuncturists.    Everyone and anyone apparently is an Acupuncturist.   The most reliable seems to be doctors trained in western medicine who are also trained in Acupuncture from China.    We found one such very reputed doctor in Chennai.    His clinic was far and highly wheel chair inaccessible.   The thought of taking our father everyday to that clinic seemed like a mini nightmare. While still on a hunt for a good Acupuncturist, serendipitously we were told of an ‘Acutouch’ doctor who was in the same area in Chennai as us.   Never to let any opportunity to slip by, we paid a visit to the Doctors home clinic.   The house located on a rather quiet st...

We seemed to have had some progress in the 10 months since the hemorrhage, but nothing significant to change our father’s everyday comfort.  At our wits end on the next steps in rehabilitation, my sister contacted one Dr. Vishalakshi Raman who specializes in Cognitive Rehabilitation.   The Doctor suggested we pick couple of puzzles and games, match it with music and repeat the games everyday – at the same time, with the same music.   The right brain which is receptive to music apparently would get activated and would learn to associate that music with that particular puzzle or game.   This stimulation is likely to help the right brain learn some of the activities of the left brain.  So we picked up some games last evening.  The first one we tried was placing the shapes in its appropriate spaces.  My sister and I watched him with breathless expectation.  All the achievements throughout our father’s life did not match the triumph ...

Intense and consistent physiotherapy is a huge part of stroke rehabilitation.   So we look out for physiotherapists to come home twice a day.     Finding a good nurse, yes, we thought that would be some challenge.   But finding a good physiotherapist, didn’t know efficient ones were rare finds.   In span of week we changed almost 10 physiotherapists.     One of the biggest issues turned out to be our father’s weight.   He was a big boy, weighing almost 80 kgs and with a height of 5 feet and 9 inches.   They just could not lift him.   It would take the physiotherapist, our nurse, our driver and one of us (my sister or myself) to make him stand.   However it all came down to our driver.    The physiotherapist would give directions and our poor driver would hoist our father.    So our main criteria - a physiotherapist who would not make our dear driver slave away.   Apparently that was too much to ask for. ...