Finding Balance

Hello, friends. You may have noticed that I haven’t been around the studio much lately. Things haven’t exactly been going according to plan. I had what you might call a health event.

I was thrilled to lead the Balanced Body® Mat 1 Instructor Training program over the last weekend in February. I was anxious leading up to it because I wanted to do a great job–our students deserve it! But I was definitely running on fumes–I wasn’t sleeping a lot, burning the candle at both ends, and maintaining a hectic schedule. Ever since I went to Sacramento in July to take the Pilates Educator course, my life has been go, go, go! Even our long anticipated vacation in September was busy, with ten days of trekking and camping, long haul flights and the chaos of international travel.

On my day off following the teacher training weekend, I went to my regular Hot Pilates class, part of my personal practice. By the end of class, I was unusually exhausted, and really struggling with my balance. I chalked it up to low blood sugar and being overtired, and stopped for a protein drink and a snack. When I got up to leave the gym, however, I knew something wasn’t right. I was dizzy and my hands felt strange. I sat down and called my partner, and as soon as I heard my own voice, I knew I was in trouble. I recalled a social media post from a woman describing what it felt like to have a heart attack–no chest pain or aching arm, but this overwhelming feeling of unease. I didn’t think I was having a heart attack, though–I believed I was having a stroke. With Robbie still on the phone, a kind young woman next to me went for help. Being wheeled out of the gym on a gurney was mortifying, but I was so glad I was there, with people who cared and wanted to help, and not on the subway or an escalator, on a mountain in Africa, or running on the nature trail all by myself.

That awful feeling only lasted five or ten minutes, and nobody could be certain what was going on with me. Even in the Emergency Room, after a round of tests and a CT scan, the doctors weren’t convinced I’d actually had a stroke. But I followed up and went to the TAMS Clinic at Toronto Western Hospital two days later, and an MRI showed a handful of white sparks in the right parietal lobe of my brain. A blood clot of unknown origin had burst. I’d had a mild ischemic stroke. I was really glad Robbie had not just dropped me off and gone to work as originally planned, because it was a lot to take in that day. I was rattled.

I vacillate between feeling incredibly lucky, and extraordinarily frustrated. Because of my relatively young age and no obvious cause, I’ve been able to get a lot of tests quickly. No one wants me to have another stroke. But because I can still walk and talk, I also haven’t been given much guidance as to how to proceed. I’m still going through tests to understand what happened. I went back to work because work is my identity. I don’t know who I am without work! I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone. And like most people, I have bills to pay. But I started to feel dizzy all the time. And I didn’t know why. I fall into a weird category of stroke survivors because I don’t have any obvious deficits, but something is different. It took a month for me to learn that the exact part of my brain that was affected impacts proprioception and vestibular function–in other words, my balance. I know now why I feel sensitive to light and noise, and that I should have been on a break from screens. And that Post Stroke Fatigue is the thing that makes me want to sleep 12 hours a day.

It’s really scary to feel like you could lose not only your livelihood, but control of your body. I’ve been an athlete my whole life. My body has changed over the years, but I’ve always been an active person, seeking adventure and physical challenges. My parents died pretty young, so I’ve been hyper vigilant about my health. As I get closer to the age my dad was when he passed away, I feel more concerned that I haven’t done all the things that I wanted to do in my life–professionally and for the love of it–and I worry that I’m running out of time. But what this recent scare is teaching me is that I need to be better at managing stress, and I need to accept that the best path to recovery is not to forge ahead as I often do, but to rest my tired brain, and return to work gradually, because the studio is not going anywhere.

Thanks for all of your concern. I appreciate it very much. See you soon.

Pam Ferguson
Retrofit Master Instructor
Lead Instructor/Operations Associate