Narratives of Stroke Survivors: Between Trauma and Redemption

Abstract

This study’s aim was to explore how stroke survivors cope with their stroke and its consequences. While the concept of chronic illness dominates the stroke -recovery literature, for some, their stroke is part of an ongoing life story. Bury conceptualized chronic illness as a major disruptive experience, specifically for rheumatoid arthritis patients. The interviews in this article focused on how individuals reconstructed their lives post-injury/stroke. This article seeks to investigate whether stroke survivors also construct their stroke as a biographic disruption. Open-ended interviews were conducted with 33 stroke survivors. It was found that stroke survivors choose hope more than they do grief, often contrary to their physician’s evaluation. Moreover, while the story of the onset was always sad, they chose to turn their backs on the victim role and being sick, and found ways to live with it. For them, it appears that the stroke is part of an ongoing life story more than it is a “biographical disruption.” Most of them were narratives of redemption, rather than contamination. My conclusion is that stroke survivors can choose how to construct a stroke’s onset as well as its consequences.

Keywords:

• Disability
• grief
• hope
• narrative
• redemption
• stroke

Notes

1 Notes Rosh HaShana through Succot

2 To qualify for disability

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Orly Turgeman Goldschmidt

Orly Turgeman-Goldschmidt, PhD, is a doctoral instructor of the Interdisciplinary Department of Social Sciences at Bar-Ilan University. She received her PhD in sociology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has experience in quantitative and qualitative methods and published studies on gender differences in talking and computer hackers. Her current research interests are digital culture and stroke survivors.