“I knew immediately that it was completely mad.”
Maria Pedersen had the home in Ringkøbing filled with guests the day in november last year, where her oldest son celebrated he age of six years.
But up on the first floor in the house, she was alone, when suddenly she could feel that something was as it should be.
“The only thing I thought was that I had to hurry and get locked up the door and come out from the toilet, I could immediately feel that I should faint,” she explains.
After coming out from the toilet, rushed her on to the living room, where she could hear voices seep up from the ground floor. One of the parts recognized as his sister’s.
“Malene,”, she call before she could feel that she was going to have to lay down.
“Malene,” she called again. To begin with, thought the sister, that it was probably Mary’s knee, as she had come to harm during a handball match before, which had led to her sister lay on the floor.
It was not.
“What is it? Is it something serious?,” remember Maria, that her sister asked.
“Yes. That’s it,” replied Maria.
She ran downstairs to the family to pick up his phone and rang for an ambulance. While she spoke with the emergency, and let Maria in and out of consciousness. The sister therefore received a message that she should try to arouse Maria by, among other things, to tweak her.
the First time, there was nothing. The second time she awoke from her.
She began to throw up. Again and again. Her neck began to hurt, like her head did it, and finally cried out her pain.
After the ambulance arrived, she was strapped on a stretcher and carried downstairs. Her two children – sons Lukan and Micah, as she has with her boyfriend Nicholas – had been sent into a different room, so that they would not see her, but she could hear how Micah’s, who was then three years old, screamed and screamed and screamed at his mother.
Ambulanceturen to the hospital in Herning, denmark, she remembers nothing of. First at the department woke up she when the doctors asked her questions, and did a lot of research. It all was overwhelming.
“As I’ll put into a scanner, I can remember that I think: ‘Now I can get some peace’. There was just happened so much, and I had it so bad that I would just like to have peace and sleep,” explains the 35-year-old Maria.
Scanningsbillederne gave the doctors the answers they had been looking for.
Maria had been hit by a hjernehindeblødning. A bleeding, which in most cases is due to a fairing on one of the brain’s arteries bursts. More than 15 percent of those who get hit by it, losing their lives in the moment, where the bleeding occurs.
the Rest will be affected. In one way or another.
After scanningsbillederne was ready, was Maria with the same sent on to Aarhus, where she after being placed in the respirator, and have been placed sinks in the head was operated on.
When she awoke and came to herself again, it was to a new life. A life where she quickly gets tired, can’t fathom all that she could before, and where among other things, her balance is not the same as in the past.
For a life where she has had to fight with, that she is not just happy to have survived.
But also to a life where her priorities have changed.
“I lay on the living room with a young guy who had been wrong. He was what one would probably describe as ‘a vegetable’. So you think very much, how lucky you have been and how you would like to change a lot in one’s life. It really puts your life in perspective. What is important and what is not,” explains Maria.
Where she previously had a supertravlt and time-consuming job as projektassistent in a projektudviklingsfirma, where she stood for a lot of construction projects with owner-occupied housing, had many balls in the air and also be able to find to answer emails if she woke up in the night, it is now made of.
Now is it the family that comes first.
But she is still dreaming to get back on the labour market.
“I have an immense need to take on the work and make a good effort. It is how I am, apparently. And it motivates me. I strive to work and have a normal life again. But it should not be the case that I take on work and so can’t be something for my family afterwards, because I have used all my forces there,” she says, and stops up a little.
“I’m Sorry, now I was a little confused. There is such a thing, that happens sometime in between,” she says.
It is also something that is new. That she sometimes loses the thread in the middle of a conversation or become confused.
in Addition, her memory has been bad so she has to write everything down to be sure to be able to remember it. And she is going to have to keep to rest several times in the course of the day, if she wants to avoid that she becomes overtired and the strain on his head and his body too much.
the Change was, however, first, something that really started to go up for her, after she had been discharged from the hospital. And it is something she has struggled and continues to struggle with having to get used to.
the sense of touch in her fingers, feet and legs are no longer the same. Especially in the left side. So when she must put her hair, and her hands meet behind her head, so she is not always fully mastered, it’s her own hands that meet.
“It may sound quite strange, but my hands can not properly recognize each other,” she explains.
however, It is not the worst.
“Some of it, I’ve been crying most about is that my children – especially the little – loves to be stroked on his back, when he must sleep. And I don’t have the same feeling of skin-against-skin longer. I can’t feel it, feel him, in the same way as before. It made me really sad,” explains Maria.
“When I was in the hospital, I had all these ideas that we should change our life, be more positive and travel more. And then you come home to everyday and find out that it can’t really, because you are sick and tired. So all the things I had thought I would, those I can’t. And it is hugely frustrating and difficult, and it takes time to learn,” explains Maria.
the Frustrations, and all that tricky, she has had to get used to, however, is not really something, she shares with others.
“I don’t want to be a burden. And I may well have a hard time accepting help. I would rather do anything other than that they must do something for me,” says Maria.
Why do you think you have it like that?
“That is enough, because I want to clear myself on all points in my life. And I can’t check it here. It is here I can’t control, and it is so annoying when I’m used to be able to control everything else. And then I’m mad at myself over that when I was allowed to survive, that I saw not just happy.”
instead of being happy, she was long sorry. Actually ended up with to get a depression that she now get antidepressants for. Something that many others who may be affected by a hjernehindeblødning, also get.
Although the medication helps, struggling, but still she still. Among other things, to be seen as themselves.
“I saw at a time to be presented to another person as: ‘This is Maria, the woman who had the stroke’. And it is simply so strange a stamp to get on themselves. I will be ‘Maria with hjerneblødningen’ and not just ‘Maria’. For I am so much more than that.”
in Addition, the struggles she is also with – and against – a bad conscience.
“I have it bad with that it is hard for everyone else. I have it bad with my girlfriend, my siblings and my mother are sad and crying. They have clearly experienced it in a different way than me. It was not something I did intentionally, with this I still have a bad conscience about the scars I have given them to the soul. It must be enough, that I’m sorry. They must not be bored by it,” says Maria.
When she at one point talked to a neuropsychologist, who should make an assessment of her, it was written in the papers, that she is ‘ill-suited to this type of damage’.
“how crazy Is that? That one can be ill-suited to it,” laughs she.
She explains that it is because she is so perfectionist and a control freak, that she is bad at it. For she will be better. Have it better. So she whips herself in time.
“even if the wise say it should not. But I think, conversely, that it is my strength,” says Maria and ends:
“that’s It, that should get me out on the other side. For it I will. So I keep thinking that I should probably win. At a time.”
Have you also experienced that your life has suddenly been turned on its head? And would you like to tell your story? Write to the journalist, Maria Christine Madsen at the mama@bt.dk.
