Out of Sight

"I want to get rid of all the books," a frustrated Mr. Ginley said. 

Any

Stroky McStrokerson's Selfie

one who knows my husband understands that this has been the most gut-wrenching consequence of the stroke.

He's a lifelong reader, and his current difficulty in reading is devastating. We have books. A lot of books. But his doctor was very cautious about his ability to zoom through a 500-page tome again. She told him he'd likely come out of this with a significant blind spot in his left eye. 

The awful thing is it's not simply that he can't see properly out of his left eye; it's that his brain doesn't always process what he's seeing correctly. My sister got him a workbook with different exercises to do, and he's struggled at times. 

"I can't find 'Frank Sinatra' in this word search puzzle," he huffed the other night as I made dinner.

I looked at the list and told him Old Blue Eyes wasn't on the list of words he was supposed to find. 

On the other hand, he just got the sport trivia workbook I ordered for him, and he's already done a few pages in that and has done well. 

The brain is a weird and mysterious place. We're hoping it finds a work-around for his vision problems. In the meantime, he helps me with the Spelling Bee anagram I do in the New York Times, and he tackles the Sports Connection puzzle on my phone daily.

Of course, there are audio books. He's burning through those, along with AA batteries. He's also taken to listening to music at night before bedtime, which helps him sleep. At first, it was a little unsettling to hear him crooning in the other room, only because I wasn't sure if he was calling for me. But last night, I recognized a tune by the Moody Blues, so I trundled back off to my own slumbers.

This week, he'll be going in for this third try at kidney stone removal. Hopefully, this trilogy will wrap up that part of the program for good, and we can concentrate on everything else that needs to be fixed. 

Fingers crossed.