When someone has had a stroke you might not know what to do or say to the person.  Sometimes people steer away from those who can’t talk, look different, or walk oddly.  I know this because I had severe stroke seven years ago, aged 45 and I couldn’t talk, walk and I looked odd.  

I truly know how people act, because I’m a stroke survivor.  Today, I still have some small issues with my speech, but now people don’t notice I’ve had a stroke if they are just looking at me.

Strokes run in my family.  My mum had a stroke in 1995 due to a carotid artery on the left hand side.  She was treated in King’s College Hospital.  Our strokes were similar, but her stroke was less severe than mine.  We shared problems with speech.  She could walk and was not in a wheelchair and her face was ‘normal’ and she returned to driving just a year after her stroke.   Since her dad had died from stroke many years ago, we were told it could be hereditary and that my sisters and I may have the same issues in the future.  From that moment on I realised I had my mum’s stature and not my dad’s really.  She had a long neck, which was similar to mine and I saw more signs.  I kept all of this to myself, I first needed to understand it – and to process it.  My mum died few years later of cancer.  It doesn’t rain but it pours!

A few years after that, my wife (now ex-wife, Sandra) and our kids (Ben and Lauren) had gone down to Kent to stay with her mum for a holiday for two weeks.  I couldn’t go with them because of work.  I had plans to decorate the kids’ rooms, clean the house and similar things like that while I wasn’t at work.  It was so quiet in the house when the others weren’t there and so my thoughts turned into looking for a way to get myself out of this future ‘could-be’ stroke.  I would forget about it for a few days, but the same thoughts would turn up unexpectedly and since Mum’s stroke this was a fairly normal thinking process for me.  I must have it checked out by a doctor, I mean, it’s hereditary right?  In the meantime I would research strokes on my computer.  I wanted to have all the information out there that was available to me.

A few years later in 2010 we were living in Kent and I had continued reading, visiting websites and watching videos about stroke.  I had spoken with my doctor who had said that it wasn’t really hereditary (in her mind) and that she was confident about that.  She said that she could put me on a list, but it was a very long list, and it could be a year or two to get the scan on my neck and that I could be dropped from the list at any point.  I moped out of the surgery.  I was low, and felt there was nothing I could do – even the doctor had said what she said.  I felt there was no hope for me

Three years later I was in hospital, laying in a bed with symptoms of a severe stroke, waiting to get a scan of my neck.

Eyes………. that was the first thought when I had a severe stroke.

I was trying to sort through everything in my dishevelled brain – originally – I had no speech internally, but ironically my brain sorted it out.

I looked in the mirror and I thought about eyes – when my mind would let me.  Were these my eyes, or somebody else’s?  I couldn’t organise my thoughts and feelings, but I started to know it was me, looking at myself, through my eyes.

Everything felt weird …. very weird!  It was like being in a dream but awake at the same time, if you know what I mean.  But the reality for me was I was living in a dream and nightmare simultaneously.  One minute I was alive and the next minute I couldn’t even walk or speak, and my right side of body was lifeless.  I couldn’t even feel it!  I couldn’t communicate, with sounds or hand and body gestures.  Nothing would happen in my body.  I thought that maybe I had died.

Just less than six months in the hospital I was released.  I could say maybe five or six words.  The doctor said my speech could very well stay like that for life.  I couldn’t speak apart from those five or six words, and was still unable to use my body to gesture.  I looked blank.  Whether someone was speaking to me or not, the outside of me looked blank.  But I was listening to everything that was said to me and I still had the memory to store what people had said.  I wished I could speak or write it down and let them know, so desperately.

Early on I started thinking it is “do or die” for me.  It’s taken me so long to get where I am today but I have the determination to get better still.  It’s my goal for a full recovery!  It doesn’t matter how long as it takes, or even if it could be a small chance that I will get there – but there still IS a chance

Many people think they have read what a stroke is like and sympathise but no one other than fellow stroke survivors will know in detail what it’s like.  It was a major hurdle for me when everyone thought I was in fairy land and instead I was being crushed over time by being unable to speak.

I refused to take on society’s stance on stroke and negativity.  I realised early on that negativity was the biggest mountain for me to get over and not the stroke.

I see it as this.  I already believed the stroke was coming and it did.  If you can get more help and fight for support  beforehand then please do get that help.  I also know that if it does happen, you can get through it and back out of the other side of a stroke, possibly.  Only you can do it!

I’m living in Kent on my own with my dog Jake.  The future for me is onwards and upwards so they say.  Thank you very much for reading my story.