It was after this that I just didn’t feel right – but I put it down to the cold and sat quietly for a while hoping to improve. When I stood up in the bathroom later on is where it all went wrong! I fell. I don’t recall why or how, but I was lying on the bathroom floor and my husband came upstairs to see what the noise was!

All I remember then was thinking I was lying on something uncomfortable and pulling it out from underneath me, only to discover it was my right arm! That was a bit of a shock, as was the fact that I couldn’t speak to tell my husband anything.

So, an ambulance was called and the children were dropped off at a friend’s house. I remember being strapped into a chair and being carried downstairs to the ambulance, but the rest is a bit of a blur.

The next thing I recall is coming round in a hospital bed with lots of nurses chatting nearby (it turns out I was in a room behind the nurses’ station!). My husband and my parents came to visit me at various times over the next few days and I had various scans, and sitting up sessions and walking along the corridor/up some stairs sessions, and was then told that I was being sent home as there were no beds in the rehab ward for me!

So, I had my stroke (an ischaemic stroke with left internal carotid artery dissection) on the Sunday and was home again on the Thursday, with instructions to go to my GP in a couple of days time! I duly did this but was surprised to find that my GP knew nothing about why I had come in to see him! He then got the referral letter and told me how exciting it was that I had had a mechanical thrombectomy –

“A what?” was my response!

And when he explained it to me it helped me understand why I had such a humungous bruise on my thigh!!!!

I then spent the next few months working out warfarin levels, sorting out my eyesight, trying to get some physio sorted out and generally fighting everything that I was told was going to be ‘harder now’. When I went in for my final consultant appointment in the December I was told that it had just been ‘one of those things’ and that I was no more at risk of it happening again than he or my husband were. Although this was good to hear I spent the best part of the next three years double checking every time I swallowed funny or had a headache.

I’m a very lucky woman to have received such great care from my family and the NHS on the day of my stroke and the time I spent in hospital in Stoke and I cannot thank them enough.