- Lewis Bartelle
- 7 days ago
Updated: 12 hours ago
What a Stroke Reveals About the People Around You
Hey everyone, Lewis here.
I want to talk about something that caught me completely off guard in my recovery. Something I was not expecting and was not prepared for — and that turned out to be one of the most important and most painful lessons of this entire journey.
When my stroke hit, the people around me showed me exactly who they were.
Not who I thought they were. Not who they had presented themselves as across years of friendship and family and shared history. Who they actually were — underneath all of that, when the circumstances got hard enough and sustained enough to strip away the performance and show the real thing underneath.
Some of what I saw took my breath away with its beauty. And some of it broke my heart.
This article is about both.
The First Wave — Everyone Shows Up
Here is what almost always happens immediately after a stroke.
The news travels and the people come.
The waiting room fills. The cards arrive. The phone buzzes constantly. The meals get dropped off. The offers of help pour in from directions you never expected. People who you had not spoken to in years reach out. Acquaintances show a depth of care that surprises you. The community wraps around the survivor and the family in a way that is genuinely moving and genuinely sustaining in those first impossible days and weeks.
I remember the warmth of that first wave. The sense of not being alone in something enormous. The evidence — tangible, visible, showing up in actual human form — that people cared.
And then something happens that nobody warns you about.
The acute phase ends. The crisis stabilizes. The dramatic, visible, clearly urgent part of the story moves into a quieter, slower, less dramatic chapter. Life, for the people who love you, begins to return to something resembling normal. And gradually — not all at once, not dramatically, but steadily and unmistakably — the first wave recedes.
Some people stay. Some people fade. And the difference between those two groups turns out to be one of the most revealing things a stroke ever shows you.
The Ones Who Stayed
Let me start here because this is the part I want you to hold onto when the rest of this article gets harder.
The people who stayed — who showed up not just in the first dramatic weeks but in the long, unglamorous, unsexy months and years of actual recovery (the "long middle") — are the most extraordinary human beings I have ever encountered. And I mean that without any exaggeration.
Staying is hard. Staying means watching someone you love fight something difficult and slow without the adrenaline of the acute phase to carry you through. It means adjusting your communication because dysarthria is part of every conversation now. It means learning a new patience for the pace of recovery. It means absorbing frustration that is not directed at you but lands near you anyway, and choosing to understand rather than react. It means showing up on a Tuesday when there is no crisis and no emergency and no particular reason to be there except that you said you would be and you are.
Staying is a choice made over and over again across months and years. And the people who make that choice — consistently, without fanfare, without requiring recognition for doing it — those are your true Cornerstones. The load bearing pieces of your recovery foundation. The ones the puzzle cannot be assembled without.
I think about the people in my corner who stayed during therapy milestones and the quiet ordinary days that did not have anything particularly notable about them except that I was still in this fight and they were still beside me.
God put people in my life at exactly the right moments who had no obligation to be there and chose to be anyway.
I count that as one of the clearest blessings of this entire journey.
If you have people like that in your life right now — name them. Thank them. Tell them specifically what their staying has meant. Because staying costs something and it deserves to be acknowledged.
The Ones Who Faded
Now for the harder part. And I want to approach this with as much grace and honesty as I can, because I have had thirteen plus years to process it and I know how raw it can feel when you are still in the middle of it.
Some people faded. And it hurt.
Not the acquaintances whose first wave support was always going to be brief — that is understandable and appropriate and not what I am talking about. I am talking about the people I expected to stay. The ones whose relationship with me felt substantial enough to weather something like this. The friends of years. The family members I assumed would be Cornerstones. The people who showed up in the first wave and then, slowly and without announcement, disappeared into the demands of their own lives.
Some of them I heard from less and less as the months went on. Some of them pulled back in ways that were never explicitly explained. Some of them were still physically present but emotionally absent — there in body, checked out in spirit, visibly uncomfortable with the sustained reality of what this journey looked like.
And some of them said things that revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of what stroke recovery actually requires. Things that made clear they had expected a different timeline. A faster return to normal. A version of me that was closer to the original and less demanding of patience and accommodation and genuine, sustained attention.
I want to be careful here because the reasons people fade are complicated and not always what they appear to be. Some people genuinely do not know how to be present with sustained difficulty — not because they do not care but because they have never developed that capacity and the stroke exposed the gap.
Some people are dealing with their own things that stroke recovery is competing with for their bandwidth. Some people loved me in a way that was real but did not have the specific kind of endurance that this particular journey required.
Understanding that does not make the absence hurt less. But it helps me hold the loss without bitterness. And bitterness is a weight stroke recovery cannot afford.
The Loss Within the Loss
Here is something I want to name directly because I do not think it gets talked about enough.
Losing people during stroke recovery is its own grief. On top of the grief for the former self. On top of the grief for the capabilities and the career and the life that looked different before. On top of all of that — the loss of relationships you thought were solid is a specific, sharp, genuinely painful kind of hurt that deserves to be acknowledged as real.
You are allowed to grieve those losses. You are allowed to feel the sting of the absence. You are allowed to be honest about the fact that some people showed you something during this time that changed how you see them — and that the changed seeing, even if it ultimately led somewhere clarifying, came with a cost.
What you are not allowed to do — or rather what I would encourage you not to do — is let that grief become the story. Let it be a chapter. Let it be a painful and instructive and ultimately clarifying chapter in the larger story of who showed up for you and what that meant. But do not let it become the whole book.
Because the whole book also contains the ones who stayed. And those people — those extraordinary, choosing-it-every-day, showing-up-on-a-Tuesday people — deserve the biggest chapters.
What the Stroke Was Actually Revealing
Here is the reframe that took me years to arrive at and that I now hold onto firmly.
The stroke did not cause the people who faded to be who they turned out to be. It revealed who they already were. The capacity — or the limitation — was always there. The stroke just created the conditions that made it visible.
And the same is true in the other direction. The people who showed their true colors in extraordinary ways — the ones whose depth and loyalty and genuine care became unmistakable under the pressure of this journey — they were always those people too. The stroke just gave them the conditions to show it.
This is what I mean when I talk about true colors. Crisis does not change people. It illuminates them. It turns up the contrast on qualities that were always present but not always visible in the normal, comfortable, low stakes conditions of everyday life.
And once you see those true colors clearly — in both directions — you have information. Real, valuable, clarifying information about who belongs in your inner circle and who belongs at a different distance. That information is one of the unexpected gifts of this journey. Expensive. Painful in the getting. But genuinely useful in the living.
Building Your Circle From What You Learned
So what do you do with what the stroke revealed?
You build from it. Intentionally. Deliberately. With the clarity that only comes from having had the performance stripped away and the real thing left standing.
You draw your Cornerstones close — the ones who proved themselves load bearing. You lean on them without guilt. You tell them what their staying meant and keep telling them because they deserve to hear it. You let their presence be the foundation that it is and you build outward from them.
You hold the ones who faded with grace — not with bitterness, not with the ongoing energy of hurt and resentment, but with the clear eyed understanding of what you learned and the appropriate adjustment of where they fit in your life going forward. Some relationships can be rebuilt on a different foundation than the one you assumed was there. Some cannot. Knowing the difference is part of the work.
And you look for the community that was built for exactly this — the people who understand what you are carrying not because they were there on October 7th but because they have their own date. Their own coma, their own gait belt, their own discharge folder, their own long middle.
That community exists. I found mine in 2016 through Stroke INSPIRE and it changed the trajectory of my recovery. Not because it replaced the Cornerstones in my personal life but because it added a layer of understanding that only people who have walked this exact path can provide. When everyone in the room nods because they know precisely what you mean — that validation is immediate and profound and unlike anything else available on this journey.
Come find that in the Beyond The Shatter community on Facebook. It is full of survivors at every stage who showed up because they needed exactly what you need right now — people who get it without explanation. And if you are ready to let your story become a light for someone else who is trying to figure out who showed up for them — the Army of Warriors program at BeyondtheShatter.com is waiting. Always free. Always yours.
The Gift Inside the Hard Truth
I want to close with this because I mean it completely.
The stroke showing you people’s true colors is one of the hardest gifts this journey gives you. Hard because some of what gets revealed is painful. Hard because the clarity comes at a cost. Hard because you did not ask for this particular education and you would have preferred to learn it some other way.
But it is a gift. Because you now know — with a certainty you could not have had before — exactly who your people are. The ones who stayed. The ones who chose it over and over again across the months and years of a journey that asked a lot of everyone in it. The ones whose true colors turned out to be extraordinary.
Those people are your foundation. Build on them. They earned it. And so did you.
— Lewis
- Lewis Bartelle
- Apr 19
Updated: 12 hours ago
Finding What the Stroke Moved, Not Took
Hey everyone, Lewis here.
I want to talk about the moment that stopped me cold somewhere in the middle of my recovery.
I was sitting at my puzzle table — the same one where the occupational therapy sessions had first introduced me to what would become the central metaphor of everything I have built since — and I was staring at a gap. A section of the puzzle where several pieces clearly belonged together but none of the pieces in front of me seemed to fit. I had tried every piece within reach.
Nothing worked.
And for a moment the thought crept in that maybe those pieces were simply gone. Lost under the furniture somewhere. Missing from the box before it was ever opened. Just — absent. With no replacement coming.
I almost moved on and left the gap there.
Then I looked in the corner of the table where I had pushed aside a small pile of pieces I had already sorted through and dismissed. And there they were. Right where I had left them. Not missing at all — just waiting in a place I had stopped looking.
That moment taught me something about stroke recovery that I have never forgotten.
Most of what feels missing has not disappeared. It has moved. And the difference between those two things is everything.
The Inventory of Loss
Before I go further I want to acknowledge something honestly — because this article only works if we are telling the truth about the full picture.
Some pieces are genuinely different after a stroke. Some capabilities have been altered in ways that are real and permanent. My cerebellum sustained damage that affects my balance, my coordination, and my speech every single day thirteen plus years later.
The career I spent eleven years building ended on October 7th 2012 and did not come back in the same form. The physical ease I moved through the world with — the running, the wrenching on cars, the rapid fire conversation — those pieces look different now than they did before.
I am not going to tell you that everything comes back if you just believe hard enough. That is not honest and it is not useful and you deserve better than that from me.
What I am going to tell you is this: the gap between what the stroke took and what feels missing is often much larger than reality. We tend to look at the altered pieces and the genuinely changed capabilities and then — in the exhaustion and grief of early recovery — we start labeling everything we cannot immediately see as gone. Permanently absent. Not coming back.
And that labeling, done too quickly and too broadly, closes doors that are still very much open.
What the Stroke Moved
Here is my own story. And I am sharing it not because it is dramatic but because it is specific — and specific is what makes this real.
Before my stroke I was building a custom lowrider. This was not a hobby. This was a passion that went back to my earliest days in the car audio business, that ran through eleven years of building some of the most head turning rides on the road, that was woven into my identity as completely as anything I have ever done. The truck in my garage was an expression of who I was — the craftsmanship, the precision, the pride of building something remarkable with your own hands. I would call it “my rolling resume”.
The stroke took that.
Not the love of it — the ability to execute it in that specific form. The fine motor demands. The physical requirements. The version of me that could spend a weekend under a hood without my hands shaking or my balance failing or my vision doubling at the wrong moment. I eventually had to sell the truck. And for a long time that felt like one of the most significant missing pieces of my entire recovery. A gap in the puzzle I did not know how to fill.
Then I discovered high end Lego car kits.
Intricate. Precise. Technically demanding in exactly the ways that stroke recovery was asking me to rebuild — fine motor coordination, focus, sequencing, problem solving, the executive function of following complex instructions step by step. My occupational therapist would have assigned it as therapy. For me it was passion. My love of building, of cars, of the deep satisfaction of something complex coming together piece by piece under my hands.
The piece was not missing. It had moved. From a full scale custom lowrider to a three thousand eight hundred piece Lego Technic set. Different form. Same soul. And building those kits — every click of a piece into place, every section completed, every time I looked at what my hands had made — was the puzzle piece of who I am clicking back into its spot.
That is what I mean when I say the stroke moved things rather than took them.
The Three Types of Pieces
In my experience there are three kinds of pieces in the post stroke puzzle and learning to tell them apart changes everything about how you approach the assembly.
The pieces that came back.
These are the capabilities, the relationships, the aspects of your identity that the stroke disrupted but did not permanently alter. They feel gone in the early stages — sometimes for months, sometimes for years — but with consistent effort, neuroplasticity, and time they return. Not always in exactly the same form but recognizably yours. The word that finally came out clear. The step taken without assistance. The conversation held without losing the thread. These pieces were never gone. They were in the corner. And the work of recovery is largely the work of finding them and placing them back where they belong.
The pieces that changed shape.
These are the ones that require the most creativity and the most patience. The capability that will not return in its original form but whose essence — the passion underneath, the identity it represented, the need it fulfilled — is still completely present and waiting to find a new expression.
My lowrider became Lego kits. A surgeon whose hands can no longer operate might become a medical educator whose knowledge saves lives in a completely different way.
A runner whose stride has permanently changed might discover that the discipline and the solitude and the physical challenge of running were always what mattered — and find them again in a different movement. These pieces did not disappear. They are waiting for you to stop looking for their original shape and start looking for what they were always really about.
The pieces that are genuinely different.
These deserve honesty and they deserve to be honored. Some things changed permanently on October 7th 2012 and they are not coming back in the original form no matter how hard I work or how long I wait. And part of the work of building this new puzzle is making peace with those pieces — not in a defeated way, not in a giving up way, but in the clear eyed way of a builder who looks at the pieces available and says: okay. This is what I am working with. Now what can I build?
Honoring real limitations is not the same as accepting the Permanent Ceiling Trap. One is wisdom. The other is surrender. The difference is whether you have actually tested the limit — consistently, specifically, over time — or whether you decided it was permanent before you truly found out.
How to Find What Moved
So how do you actually look for the pieces that seem missing? Here is what I have learned works:
Stop looking for the original shape.
This is the hardest one. When we look for missing pieces we tend to look for exactly what was there before — the same form, the same function, the same feel. But if the piece has moved it has almost certainly changed shape. You will not find it by looking for the original. You find it by asking a different question:
what did that piece actually give me? Not what did I do — but what did it mean. What need did it fulfill. What part of who I am did it express.
Answer that question honestly and you start to see the new shape the piece might be taking.
Look in the corners you dismissed.
Early in recovery when everything is overwhelming and the energy for searching is limited, we sort pieces quickly and move on. We make fast judgments about what fits and what does not. And sometimes in that speed we push pieces aside that we have not actually given a fair look.
Go back. Look again. With fresh eyes, more time, more information about who you are becoming. The piece you dismissed six months ago might be exactly what the puzzle needs right now.
Pay attention to what lights you up.
Passion is a GPS signal. The things that still make your eyes light up — even in their current limited form, even if you cannot fully access them yet — are pointing you toward the pieces that moved. Follow that signal. It knows where things went even when you do not.
Give it time.
Some pieces do not reveal themselves on your timeline. I did not discover the Lego car kits immediately. It took time, experimentation, and a willingness to try things that felt like pale substitutes before I found the thing that was actually a genuine replacement. Be patient with the search. The pieces are there. Not all of them reveal themselves at once.
The Gap Is Not the End of the Picture
I want to close with something I need you to hear if you are sitting in front of your puzzle right now looking at a gap that feels permanent.
A gap is not the end of the picture.
Some of the most beautiful mosaics in the world have deliberate spaces in them — not because the artist ran out of material but because the space itself is part of the design. What you lost, what changed, what looks different now — those spaces are part of your picture too. They are evidence of what you survived. They are the cracks where, as someone once said, the light gets in.
The puzzle you are building now is not supposed to look like the original. It is supposed to look like what you built after the original shattered — and that picture has something in it that the original never could have had. Resilience woven into every piece. Intentionality in every placement. The deep, hard won beauty of something assembled piece by piece by someone who had every reason to leave the pieces on the floor and chose instead to keep building.
Keep looking in the corners. Keep asking what the pieces were really about. Keep building with what you have while staying open to discovering what else is there.
The missing pieces are not as missing as they feel.
And the picture you are building — I promise you — is worth finishing.
If you want the complete framework for this process — the full roadmap for rebuilding life after stroke piece by piece — Beyond Shattered is on Amazon and it was written for exactly this moment. Every chapter is a stage of the assembly and the puzzle metaphor runs through all of it.
And when you are ready to share the picture you are building — when the story of what you found in the corners of your own recovery is ready to become a light for someone else — the Army of Warriors program at BeyondtheShatter.com is waiting. Always free. Always yours.
Keep building.
— Lewis
- Lewis Bartelle
- Apr 12
Updated: 12 hours ago
Navigating Stroke Recovery Without a Roadmap
Hey everyone, Lewis here.
I want to tell you about a puzzle.
Not a metaphor yet — an actual puzzle. One thousand pieces. Dumped out of the box onto a table in my occupational therapy room during the early months of my recovery. My hands were shaking. My vision was doubling. My fingers, which had once installed custom car audio systems with precision and confidence, could barely pick up a single piece without dropping it.
My therapist suggested it as fine motor work. What it became was something I never expected.
It became the most honest picture of what stroke recovery actually feels like that I have ever found. And it became the foundation of everything I have built since — the book, the platform, the community, every article on The Word. All of it grew from the lessons of that puzzle on that table in that therapy room.
Here is the first lesson — and the one I want to talk about today.
The box had no instructions.
The Box Arrives With No Instructions
When a stroke hits, here is what you get: a diagnosis, a team of professionals doing their absolute best with the time and resources they have, a period of intensive care that feels both overwhelming and strangely structured, and then — discharge day.
And on discharge day, someone hands you a folder.
Maybe it has some printed sheets about medication schedules. Maybe some general information about follow up appointments. Maybe a phone number or two. And then the door closes behind you and you are standing in the parking lot — or being wheeled to a car, or riding home in an ambulance — and the full weight of what just happened settles in.
You have been handed a thousand piece puzzle with no picture on the box and no instructions inside. Every piece is unfamiliar. Nothing looks the way it used to. You have no idea where to start. And the people who were just surrounding you with expertise and equipment and round the clock monitoring have sent you home to figure out the rest on your own.
I remember that feeling. Not just the physical disorientation of nine months in inpatient rehab followed by the transition home — but the deeper, more unsettling disorientation of realizing that nobody had actually told me how to do this. Nobody had sat down and mapped the road. Nobody had explained what the next chapter looked like or how long it would take or what I should be doing on a Tuesday afternoon when the therapist was not there and progress felt invisible and the pieces on the table looked exactly the same as they did the day before.
I was not doing it wrong. There were simply no instructions included.
And here is what I want you to know right now, wherever you are in this journey: that is not a flaw in your recovery. That is the reality of this experience. And understanding it — really understanding that the absence of a clear roadmap is not your fault and not a sign that you are lost beyond finding — it’s the first step toward building your own.
What the Puzzle Looked Like Before
Let me back up for a moment and talk about the puzzle before the stroke.
Your life before — like mine — was a finished picture. Every piece in its place. A complete, coherent image built over years of effort, experience, and choice. For me that picture included eleven years building a career I was genuinely proud of. A top installer/store manager with a custom lowrider in the garage. Daughters I could chase around the yard. Words that came out of my mouth rapid fire and clear without a second thought.
Then suddenly the pieces are everywhere. Some land face up and you can still recognize fragments of the original image. Some land face down and you have no idea what they are anymore. Some roll under the furniture and you cannot find them at all — and you spend months wondering if they are gone forever before you finally discover them waiting quietly in a corner you had not thought to look.
And you stand at the table looking at the chaos and you think — how do I even begin?
The Pieces That Seem Missing
Now I want to address something that I know is sitting in the back of your mind right now because it sat in the back of mine for years.
Some pieces seem to be missing entirely.
The ability to do something you used to do with ease. The career path that got interrupted. The physical capability that has not come back the way you hoped. The version of yourself that could walk into a room and communicate without effort. These feel like missing pieces — gaps in the puzzle where something important used to be and now there is just empty space.
I want to offer you something I discovered over thirteen plus years that genuinely changed how I see this.
Most of what feels missing has not disappeared. It has moved.
My dream before the stroke was finishing my custom lowrider I had been building. The stroke put a stop to that — the fine motor work, the physical demands, the version of me that could spend a weekend under a car were all significantly altered. For a long time that felt like a missing piece with no replacement coming.
Then I discovered high end Lego car kits. Three thousand eight hundred pieces of intricate, precise, technically demanding assembly that requires exactly the kind of focus, coordination, and problem solving that stroke recovery was asking me to rebuild. My occupational therapist would have loved it. My love of building — of cars, of craft, of the satisfaction of something complex coming together piece by piece — was not missing. It had just moved to a different corner of the puzzle.
That is what I want you to look for. Not the piece in the exact form it used to take. But the thing it represented — the passion, the identity, the capability underneath — showing up in a form you have not recognized yet because you are still looking for the original shape.
The missing pieces are often just waiting. In a corner you have not searched yet.
Building Without Instructions — Where to Start
So if there are no instructions in the box, where do you actually begin?
Here is what I have learned works. Not theory — lived experience across thirteen plus years of assembling this puzzle one piece at a time.
Start with the corner pieces.
Every puzzle builder knows you find the corners first. They are your anchor points — the stable foundation that gives the whole assembly structure. In stroke recovery those corner pieces are your Cornerstones: Faith, Love, Family, and Friends. The people and beliefs that bear the weight of your trauma with you. You cannot build on a shaky table, and you cannot assemble a life without stable anchor points to work from. Find your Cornerstones first. Everything else gets built outward from them.
Sort before you build.
You do not grab random pieces and start jamming them together hoping something fits. You sort. You look honestly at what you are working with — the physical realities, the emotional landscape, the changed capabilities, the remaining strengths. This is the inventory of loss we talk about in this series. Not dwelling in it — but being honest about what the pieces actually are before you start trying to place them.
Set SMART goals for each piece.
Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Not get better — but walk twenty feet with my cane by Friday. Not improve my speech — but practice my articulation for ten minutes before I call my grandkids on Saturday. Each piece placed is a SMART goal completed. Each SMART goal completed is the puzzle growing. That is the entire framework in one sentence.
Accept that some pieces take time.
The interior pieces of any puzzle — the ones without obvious edges or distinctive colors — take the longest to place. They require patience, repeated attempts, and the willingness to pick up the same piece multiple times before it finally reveals where it belongs. That is not failure. That is the process. Consistency is the currency of recovery and the interior pieces are where most of it gets spent.
Visualize the finished picture.
Not the original one — the new one. Close your eyes and see yourself functioning in the life you are building. Moving, speaking, connecting, contributing. That mental picture is not wishful thinking. It is a neurological tool — visualization activates the same motor pathways as physical action and keeps the brain oriented toward the possibility of progress even on the days when the physical work feels impossible.
You Are Already Building It
Here is the thing about the puzzle that I want to leave you with.
You are already building it. Right now. Every therapy session, every repeated attempt, every day you get out of bed and face this journey again — you are placing pieces. Some days you place ten. Some days you place one. Some days you pick up the same piece fifteen times and put it back down because it still will not fit and you are too tired to keep trying.
Every single one of those days counts. Every single attempt is part of the assembly. The puzzle does not stop being built on the hard days. It just builds more slowly. And slow is still forward.
I could not have told you on October 7th 2012 what the finished picture would look like. I could not have imagined the book, the platform, the community, the hospital visits, the warriors I would sit with and the stories I would hear. I could not have seen any of it from that table covered in scattered pieces.
But I kept picking them up. One at a time, on the days when I had the energy, and one more time on the days when I did not. And the picture kept growing.
Yours will too.
If you need a complete guide to this process — every stage of the assembly laid out in a framework built from lived experience — Beyond Shattered is on Amazon and it was written for the person standing at the table with no instructions and no idea where to start. That is exactly who it was built for.
And when you are ready to share the picture you are building — when you are ready to let your story become a light for someone else standing at their own table — the Army of Warriors program at BeyondtheShatter.com is waiting. Always free. Always yours.
The box had no instructions. But you have something better.
You have thirteen plus years of someone who figured it out the hard way, handing you everything they learned.
Pick up a piece. Let’s build.
— Lewis
