Can you tell us a little bit more about your experience of tiredness and having poor concentration how did that effect you? tiredness has effected me very badly very badly, I’d be talking to somebody and just feel tired all of a sudden and concentration just went straight out the window. I couldn’t make eye contact with people at first ’cause that’d just tire me out if I’m in a group of people and we’re having a conversation you know in a pub or somewhere like that, if two people are talking to me at the same time I’ll be switching from one to the other all the time trying to concentrate and talk to the person who’s talking to me instead of just waffling around all’ the place wandering around all the place.
because I’m still coping with divided issues memory, tiredness but probably from five years ago I have a much better way of practicing that … of with coping with that, and I understand why I get anxious and why I get angry the danger is, is that you take these coping strategies and you apply them and some days they work another day’s they don’t and what would happen is as I’ve mentioned earlier, if I do too much in one day I will get very tired and what the consequences of that are it affects my family because I’ll get more grumpy, and will have I’ll be short and so forth but everyone knows that’s a consequence but if dad gets too tired dad’s going to get more grumpy, but we understand why that is, because of the support we got from a psychologist so the fatigue you find that it comes and goes and affects you the amount you have to do what you have to cope with how your day goes or how your week goes yeah, absolutely [Interviewer:] and it goes up down still [Neil:] …
The fatigue thing is just the most frustrating one I have to say because you just if you if you do too much you know the consequences are the next day or the following day you’re gonna struggle, you’re just going to be far more tired … I said that has effects on everybody but that is just one of the consequences now having a stroke that I don’t know if this is correct but my brain is going at seventy percent as it was before, but if you try and do the same things you did before you’re going to get tireder I still occasionally get days, which I’m still absolutely convinced it’s about the medication that I’m on, there are still days when I waken up and feel absolutely lousy, I’ve not slept well I’m waking up in a sweat, I feel very shaky those are the days where if I was having to do something before I probably wouldn’t have done them because I would have been so anxious about something happening and now I probably would just work my way through things by thinking ‘look, if it happens it happens’ it’s not …
and you know it doesn’t happen very often but when it does, it’s useful just remind myself about where I’ve been and what I’ve discussed and what’s happened and that’s such a positive thing, I mean I see that as a really really positive thing, it’s not … an inadequacy on my part, or failure on my part to turn around and say to someone I’m feeling a bit shaky and I’m just having a bad day and you know I just need a bit of help with this and everybody responds.