Torch- Articles Written By A College Writer: Ramblings on Hemiparesis on Hemiplegia Awareness Week

I know it's been almost a month since I last posted on here but things have gotten crazy school wise and life wise too so forgive me. I will try to keep this up as best I can.

Anyway, I found out today that apparently it's Hemiplegia Awareness Week in England thanks to a charity called HemiHelp. I have hemiparesis which is the less severe form and I think that since I'm a hemiparetic American girl I should acknowledge this very fact. Right? Sure, let's go with that.

Hemiplegia most often results from a stroke, which is something not a lot of us see a child enduring but anyone can be vulnerable to a stroke and that's just reality. In the United Kingdom it is said that 1 out of every 1,000 babies is born with hemiplegia. The numbers coming out of Stateside based charities like CHASA indicate that 1 in every 2700 babies born is a stroke survivor but there is no data on hemiplegia rates themselves.

I find statistics pretty sound sources of information and while the stats may seem insignificant when put against an entire populous, they actually speak volumes.

So now that we have numbers, what is this thing? Hemiplegia means that one side of the body is completely paralyzed. What I have, hemiparesis, is less severe and it's more muscle weakness on one side versus full fledged paralysis. Hemiplegia can also affect things like emotions, behavior, sensory functions like vision and hearing, and learning processes depending on the location of the brain injury.

I sometimes help out families of newly diagnosed kids, older children, or teens via online work and communication and a frequent thing I get from parents is: "What is my child feeling?" and I can't answer that because my situation might be different from their child's and I don't want to give false information. Their child might walk with a cane like me for support or more likely they might have a completely different situation so I say I can never truly give an accurate representation of what their child feels.

Here's another important fact: Hemiplegia/hemiparesis is incurable.

Sure, treatments are out there in the form of therapies, botox, surgery, you name it but a cure doesn't exist yet. It might in the future if we ever can do brain transplants but to be frank I assume my hemiparetic body might be long dead and it won't matter to me when a cure does come along if it does but you never know with science nowadays.

But for the next sixty or seventy years I am a member of a worldwide community of individuals with this condition and I'm going to use that time to let more than just a medical condition define me.