Joyce's Stroke Recovery & Rehab Journey

As many of you may have heard, my mom, Joyce had a massive stroke on the left side of her brain on Saturday, June 21st. While she is not out of the woods yet, we and her doctors are optimistic. Your love, concern, prayers, and overall well wishes of swift healing have been heard and felt.

Mom is currently at a great hospital in Missouri, being treated by an excellent medical team. She had brain surgery on Sunday evening and has made many positive strides since. Every small sign of progress is encouraging.

While she cannot talk, she smiles at us - or makes faces and sticks out her tongue when we don’t let her have things like coffee - and is responding to conversations and finding ways to communicate back to us.

As Mom’s career has been spent working with non-verbal autistic kids, she has more skills than the average person when it comes to communicating in nontraditional ways. She’s a little snarky about us missing some of her hand gestures, but honestly, she’s always been the reigning champ at charades, so no surprise there.

Due to the severity of her stroke, it will be a long journey to hopefully speak and move the right side of her body again, as these functions are all controlled by the left side of your brain. But, Mom is already working hard and fighting to gain as much of that back as possible.

This has been a deeply emotional time for my Mom and all of us in her family. We are so grateful for the outpouring of support we have already received. We will continue to take things one day at a time and expect the next few days and weeks to include rehabilitation and therapy. Updates will be shared here as we learn more.

Your love and support are appreciated as she and our family continue this journey of healing and adjustment. Please continue to keep her in your thoughts and send prayers, well wishes, positive vibes, whatever resonates with you, towards us.

Please feel free to leave messages here. We are reading them and keeping Mom updated with them. They mean more than you know.

With love and gratitude,

Joyce’s Family