The Flood

Lindsey

I had just spent weeks, from the hospital room, rallying everyone we know and begging for help to fix up the house before we got home because I’d realized Brandon was going to be stuck trying to move around on carpet in a manual wheelchair. Really, our duplex was a pathetic excuse for “accessible” — a split layout with the bedrooms and bathroom upstairs. He could only get in from the back door. But just a few weeks away from delivering our youngest child and not much further than that from our van getting repossessed, increasingly worried (especially now) about how we were going to survive financially, I was in no position to find us a new place to live on top of everything else.

Brandon

When I finally crossed the threshold through the back sliding glass door of our house, my overriding emotion was just pure relief. Honestly, there were days in the hospital where I didn’t think Lindsey would ever actually get me out of there. It was like I was stuck in an inescapable clinical bubble that couldn’t understand me. Once I was home, my mind was still swimming in a thick brain fog, and I was desperately chasing the illusion of getting “back to normal.” I didn’t have a full grasp yet on what having a stroke meant for the rest of my life. In those early days, intimacy became my only escape hatch. I sought Lindsey out because those moments were the only time I didn’t have to face my new reality; it was a way to temporarily escape the body I felt trapped in, all while I was silently struggling to figure out how to express the overwhelm of what my body had endured.

Brandon

Amidst all the madness, the exhaustion, and the heavy physical toll, you have to learn to fiercely celebrate every single win — no matter how microscopically small it seems to the outside world. For me, the celebration started with my left pinky. I remember sitting there, pouring all my mental energy into my hand, and suddenly seeing that pinky move just a hair. It was the slightest, tiniest twitch. To a stranger, it was nothing. To me and Lindsey, it was a championship victory. At that moment, I had no clue that nine years later, that pinky would be back online, fully functional, and useful again. I didn’t know that tiny twitch was the official start of my body fighting its way back to life. In the middle of this nightmare of a mess we were standing in, seeing that finger move showed us that some of the old wires still had juice. It taught us a vital lesson: you have to celebrate the small inches like they are miles, because those tiny sparks are what eventually burn down the limitations.

Lindsey

One of the most devastating things the stroke took from him was his beautiful singing voice. His diaphragm, vocal cords, mouth muscle coordination and verbal processing were all garbled.

Fast forward to late 2022. I was sitting in my office at our house, working. Brandon was in the room next to me, listening to music on his phone — a very regular thing for him. But I stood up out of my chair and peered out the door because this time he was also… singing. A Chris Young song, every word of it. I stood there, tears streaming down my face as I listened to the sweet sound of my husband singing again for the first time in five years.