I won’t claim my handwriting was ever especially tidy, but at least it was legible before the stroke. Afterwards, I struggled to make a mark with a pen on paper. I knew what my hand needed to do. I just couldn’t make it happen.
This is not a sponsored post. I’m not being paid to write about cool stuff that makes my life easier.
It’s true that I typed more than I wrote before my stroke, but I couldn’t type everything. I was pretty blithe about the handwritten to-do lists I’d keep for work and the lists I’d write for groceries and errands. Post stroke I was glad that nobody else could see my work to-dos, but the grocery list was another story. My husband had to read that as well, and while he knew my pre-stroke handwriting, he couldn’t always make out what I wrote after my stroke.
The scary thing was, neither could I at times.
Work to-do lists only had to last me a day or two, but a grocery list? That’s built over the course of a week, and I didn’t always remember what a particular line of chickenscratching meant. This was a problem when pushing a cart full of groceries. My husband tried to take over the job of list-making, but it had always been a joint effort before, and I felt like I wasn’t doing my share, which was already a theme of my post-stroke recovery.
Fortunately, our local grocery store had the answer: There’s an app for that.
Their groceries list app can be built on their website and shared to my smartphone, or built on my smartphone. I prefer to build it on the website because I find it easier to search via a proper keyboard, but I’ve used the smartphone search a few times. The legibility problem was solved, but the bonus feature was, gasp, the organization! Items were arranged in order of location. No more doubling back because we’d forgotten that we needed something on aisle 3. I’d always been embarassed about that because my mother had always organized her handwritten lists geographically, but I’d never mastered the trick. Now I don’t have to.
It sounds like a simple thing, and it is, but I’m grateful for the simple things that make my life easier.
Rachel
I'm a writer, a knitter/spinner/weaver, a young stroke survivor, and a type 2 diabetic.
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