"I was like a baby again"

By Carole Richardson

In the news

02 August 2011 15:58

Waking up and finding herself in a hospital bed after a stroke, Barbara Hobbs stared at the double handled training cup the nurse was offering her. ‘I’m a baby again…’ she thought hazily.

Incontinent and wearing a nappy, Barbara (65) had lost every shred of the dignity she’d possessed only days earlier in her life as a successful businesswoman running an aromatherapy service in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. “I’d woken in hospital, heavily sedated and not really with it,” recalls the great gran. “I couldn’t speak or even swallow. It was as if I was in a deep sleep, though still aware of what was going on around me.

“I remember hearing my daughters crying and thinking ‘I’ll show you – I will!’ Unable to communicate, I couldn’t let them know, but right from day one I was determined to make as full a recovery as I could.”

Barbara will always be grateful to the nurse at Pinderfields Hospital who, in the early days, played Joe Longthorne music through headphones to her after hearing she was a fan. But when another nurse was dismissive of her struggle to explain that she didn’t want to use a bed pan but instead go to the toilet, Barbara decided to do what a baby does – and crawl there herself.

“It must have taken me 20 minutes but I shuffled there on my bottom with a drip in my arm. Every inch of the way I kept telling myself ‘I will do this!’. A qualified nursery nurse, Barbara cast her mind back to her training. “I started to think what babies do to develop. Crawling strengthens their muscles and colouring-in between the lines helps co-ordination,” she recalls.

Barbara threw herself back into babyhood and began re-learning how to do the basics from the beginning. Her family brought her children’s books, videos and colouring books, which she used to teach herself spoken and written words, as well as how to hold a pen.

When allowed out of hospital within five months to recover at her daughter’s home, she continued the battle. “I’m a fighter. If I’m going to do anything I will give it 120 per cent!” she laughs. And there was plenty to fight. Before the stroke, Barbara had had the world at her feet. She loved her work and spent long hours building up her business – but it was at the detriment of her health. She’s the first to admit she did no exercise and ate ‘rubbish’ ready-meals and stodgy food, often at her desk.

“I even paid somebody to walk my dog!” says Barbara. “You never ever think it will happen to you.” But when it did, in December 2000, it was a huge shock.  Despite suffering mini strokes previously, she hadn’t been warned of the risk.

“I’d stepped out of the shower and was feeling fine,” recalls Barbara who is single and lives alone. “But when I went downstairs and tried to drink a cup of tea it kept falling out of the side of my mouth. I knew I was having a stroke.”

By the time Barbara got to the phone, her right side wasn’t working and she couldn’t speak. “I had to use my elbow to dial 999,” she says. Thinking she didn’t want to die in her cottage she staggered outside, where she was picked up by an ambulance and rushed to hospital.

Along with her health, Barbara’s whole lifestyle soon came crashing down. “I lost everything - my business, my cottage, my car and all my money. I had to cash in my life insurance to pay back everybody I owed money to,” she admits. But within a year of leaving hospital she’d bought herself a caravan near the east coast and continued to direct all her efforts into getting better.

“I knew I had two choices, I could either stay disabled or fight back. That wasn’t a choice!” she says. “I took my wheelchair with me but never used it. And although it took me three months to record a clear message for my answer phone I did it eventually. I also started swimming. I can be very, very strict with myself.”

Unimpressed by the lack of information given to her, Barbara also set about researching everything she could about strokes and how to aid her recovery. A healer as well as a qualified aromatherapist, she began using oils to treat herself to aid sleep, ease joint pain, relax her and lift her mood. Her nutritional research revealed the importance of vitamins and enzymes, particularly the Q10 enzyme, which protects the heart and brain, but which the body stops producing naturally after 40.

Questioning people at garden centres, she began growing her own organic fruit and veg and devising nutritious recipes. “Where everybody else is told to eat five a day, people who’ve had a stroke should be eating ten a day,” she says.

Barbara’s improvement was slow, but within two years she was walking again unaided, and in 2006 she was awarded The Stroke Association’s Adult Courage Award, where she met actress and Yours columnist Lynda Bellingham. Struck by her amazing story, Lynda encouraged her to write a book, which she went away and did – despite being left dyslexic by the stroke and having to teach herself how to use a computer. Lynda has now promised to help her get it published.  “Barbara is one of life’s inspirations,” says Lynda. “Her attitude to age and getting on with life is fantastic. If ever there was a walking example of a strong spirit, she is it. But what really impressed me was all the serious research about vitamins and nutrition Barbara had done. She is an amazing woman.”

Barbara’s neurology consultant, Dr Louis Loizou, has written the preface to the book in which he says: “This book is readable. It comes out of personal experience and will be very useful for people who have had strokes and those in the families that care for them.”

Barbara has now recovered 80 per cent, but still struggles to swallow and has little balance – though she has a helper dog called Wacky. She has recently moved into a new home near Hull and says: “I think it sounds silly to anybody else but sometimes we go through life – as I was doing – thinking of money, power and business. But my stroke brought me back down to size and made me realise all those things count for nothing. Your health is everything.

“Helping other people gives me so much satisfaction,” she adds – and never more so though then when, out of the blue, her granddaughter Derrin (24) had a sudden stroke last November just weeks after her wedding. “It was devastating news,” she admits. “You don’t expect it to happen to someone so young.”

As a baby, Derrin had a heart problem and she and Barbara have always been close. From her early days in hospital, Barbara has been monitoring her diet and treating her with massages using essential oils. Now largely recovered, Derrin uses her gran’s recipes for soups.

“I know I wanted to help people but I never thought I’d be helping my own granddaughter,” she says. Derrin adds: “She’s been brilliant! I don’t know what I’d have done without her. We’re close anyway but because she knows exactly what I’ve been through, it’s made her even more supportive.”

 

Barbara is launching a new website to sell Q10, as well as her natural hand-made creams and essential oils. Visit www.neurocareproducts.com She is happy to be contacted on 07521 307488 or email Hobbs133@btinternet.com