{"id":9026,"date":"2013-11-26T19:25:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-27T03:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/?p=9026"},"modified":"2013-11-26T19:25:55","modified_gmt":"2013-11-27T03:25:55","slug":"stroke-survivor-exemplifies-courageous-upbeat-attitude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/stroke-survivor-exemplifies-courageous-upbeat-attitude\/","title":{"rendered":"Stroke survivor exemplifies courageous, upbeat attitude"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Rita Martin, dressed in the reds and pinks she loves. Photo: Woody Weingarten.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Strokes temporarily stole Rita Martin\u2019s speech.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s back, still a bit tentative but good enough so she can be understood easily.<\/p>\n

Her courage, on the other hand, never left.<\/p>\n

Recovery, she tells me, is \u201ca little, little, little progress at a time. I couldn\u2019t talk, and then I could. I was in a wheelchair, and then I was walking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rita laughs a lot, which makes it difficult for me not to adore her.<\/p>\n

Her overall upbeat attitude makes it impossible.<\/p>\n

\u201cI laughed in a Tibetan hospital, and in an Indian hospital, after I\u2019d had the strokes,\u201d she tells me. \u201cAnd when I couldn\u2019t talk for a year and a half, I laughed.\u201d<\/p>\n

She labels the date of her strokes, events that occur when blood momentarily stops flowing to the brain, \u201cstroke-iversaries\u201d \u2014 and believes \u201ceveryone should celebrate them because they show how much you\u2019ve done.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019d first met Rita in San Anselmo at a Pine Street Clinic celebration where she\u2019d supplied healthful hors d\u2019oeuvres.<\/p>\n

Her professional catering efforts, there and elsewhere, are usually gluten-free, sugar-free and free, in fact, of anything she deems harmful to the body, mind or spirit.<\/p>\n

She tells me she learned culinary arts by watching her grandmother \u201ccook for the whole family, when I was three or four, and she\u2019d make little kids out of challah dough and I\u2019d put the eyes on them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rita also does acupuncture.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s been licensed since 1986, after having apprenticed at Pine Street five years. But she hopes to expand her practice and do more acutonics, needle-less acupuncture with tuning forks.<\/p>\n

My wife has been patronizing the clinic for 18 years, adding Chinese herbs to her Western \u201cslash, burn and poison\u201d treatments when first diagnosed with breast cancer.<\/p>\n

She, too, has a positive attitude.<\/p>\n

But she was never sure what worked \u2014 and didn\u2019t care.<\/p>\n

Just as Rita didn\u2019t care how hard she\u2019d have to work to heal.<\/p>\n

Despite skepticism from a slew of Western docs who thought \u201cI\u2019d never talk and would only be able to watch TV and say yes or no after years of therapy,\u201d Rita was certain she could get much better much quicker.<\/p>\n

She did.<\/p>\n

She now sits in my living room sipping green tea.<\/p>\n

A glamorous 62-year-old, she\u2019s clad in the flowing reds and pinks she loves, sporting oversized bracelets and silver earrings shaped like butterflies. It\u2019s easy to picture her as a hippie in the \u201860s.<\/p>\n

She was, of course.<\/p>\n

She always liked helping others, even considered becoming a doctor until she realized it \u201cwouldn\u2019t be much fun.\u201d So she worked in Albany, New York, for Refer Switchboard, aiding \u201cdruggies, runaways, alcoholics, people escaping abusive relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then she helped start the Washington Park Free Medical Clinic there.<\/p>\n

She chats now about living on and off in San Anselmo since 1979 \u2014 with some elongated trips to Taiwan, India and Tibet thrown in, literally, for good health.<\/p>\n

Her thought processes sometimes don\u2019t make it intact from her brain or heart to her tongue.<\/p>\n

She doesn\u2019t get discouraged though.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t always that way. She \u201cgot really angry because the doctors thought I wouldn\u2019t get better and I knew I could. Then, six months into it, I got really depressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Usually, however, she\u2019d \u201cbe stubborn and figure out how to do it, or think how I could do it differently.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are \u201cvery few things that I can\u2019t do now,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

She sums up her attitude this way: \u201cSometimes I feel good, sometimes I backslide, then I feel good again, but all the time I feel like I\u2019m getting better.\u201d<\/p>\n

And she has no specific advice for other stroke survivors \u2014 except that they should \u201caccentuate the positive.\u201d<\/p>\n

She touts an optimistic book by her Mill Valley friend, Alison Bonds Shapiro, \u201cHealing into Possibility,\u201d and its companion DVD, \u201cWhat Now?\u201d<\/p>\n

Alison, who also survived two strokes, says \u201caround 700,000 occur in the United States every year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both women emphasize recovery.<\/p>\n

On the DVD, Rita notes she can hike more than nine miles a day without using a brace or quad cane.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s ahead?<\/p>\n

For others, she wants to do “stroke education, where you realize you can get better.” For herself, she wants to heal what’s still faulty \u2014 a right leg that doesn’t function fully, a right arm that’s flaccid.<\/p>\n

And she offers herself the same maxim she’d advise any recovering person: “Believe change is possible.<\/p>\n

“I\u2019m betting she\u2019ll get what she wants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Strokes temporarily stole Rita Martin\u2019s speech. But it\u2019s back, still a bit tentative but good enough so she can be understood easily. Her courage, on the other hand, never…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9026","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-woody-weingarten"},"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":true,"span_bottom":"