Life always has the potential to bring you some downs! After all it is life!

It finally dawned on me on how to articulate to others what it feels like to have a child who had a stroke; I will use geography for my analogy…

For those of you who live on or near a fault line you will totally be able to grasp this. (I also thought about people who live near the gulf or the Atlantic coast to stretch it even more into a hurricane analogy.) Imagine the brain damage from the stroke as the fault line and a seizure as the earthquake. Over the past few weeks I have heard countless stories of child survivors of stroke going years upon years without a seizure and then it strikes. Some have gone months, or the entire short lives of 12 to 20 years, some only 4 years. This fear is always in the back of my mind, as I know the mind of other parents and survivors themselves.

There are also other things that weigh in the back of my mind that we (Brendon, Stephen and I) have actually known firsthand. Growth spurts are agitators that resist normalcy. When Brendon and children like him who live with Cerebral Palsy as the result of their stroke go through a growth spurt it wreaks havoc on their little bodies—disfluencies with speech increase, spasticity increases, the affected side resists the growth causing things to be even more off kilter…

I don’t write about this to elicit feelings of sympathy but more to educate, and to actually be able to grasp for myself and eventually to be able to explain to my own little stroke hero—he deserves to know and understand his stroke when he is capable.

The beauty of everything is Brendon and all of the other SURVIVORS just did that in fact--SURVIVE. They have now left a beautiful footprint in this world! Am I blessed or what?!

I also share this because, although the first Saturday of May is designated to National Childhood Stroke Awareness Day, every day is Childhood Stroke Awareness Day for Brendon, Stephen and me. I personally designate September to really push forth Childhood Stroke Awareness because it is the month Brendon was born. He is the one who persevered, although barely 2 pounds and not even born yet when the stroke event occurred, making his debut late one September evening. Part of this push to raise awareness full force, at this time, is to celebrate the life of my biggest, yet little, Hero!

I set out almost three years ago to tell the world that children can have strokes too! My passion was fueled by the struggle to get answers for my young son—a mother knows something is wrong even when she prays every second of every day that she is wrong—and because Brendon and other children like him deserve answers for proper care and treatment!

Please take a minute or two to help me this month, as I honor Brendon and all of those who have endured a stroke as a child, by telling someone who doesn’t know that a child can, in fact, endure a stroke too! By doing so, Brendon’s stroke and the stroke of all children will not go in vein. I truly mean it when I say “knowledge is power!”

For more information on Pediatric or Childhood Stroke, and to check out our various Stroke Heros visit www.BrendonsSmile.org.

All my best,
Jessica

President/Co-Founder Brendon's Smile © 2010