I was lucky. Not in the hospital I was sent to; my wife and I watched a comatose old man in the opposite bed have a sandwich left on his tray by one orderly every mealtime, to be picked up an hour later, unopened, by another one. After a day and a half, when we reported that the old man was apparently being starved to death, my wife offered to feed him. No you cant, she was told; youre not trained.
No, I was lucky because my family had found out about pioneering research in the States: it showed that, provided there had simply been a clot in the brain, and not a bleed into it, you could reprogramme your brain so that speech, writing and physical movement assumed their old levels. The plasticity of the brain means it can reroute signals round the burnt-out channels, but the devil in it is that you have to start within three and a half weeks, we read, or for some reason the brain closes down the regenerative capacity, like a computer erasing a program that hasnt been used for a long time.
To do the reprogramming you have to do endless hours 10 hours a day in my case of the sort of exercises you last did as a child. That meant Victorian copy-book writing for two hours a day, praying for the moment when an illiterate squiggle would finally turn into a recognisable letter a; bouncing a rubber ball on the floor and forcing myself to catch it 2,000 times a day; walking the mown grass and repeating the step every time I crossed over the stripe in the lawn. I hope that Ill never again have to go through all that, but if Andrew Marr is lucky enough to have had the right type of stroke, he can look forward to being seen as himself again on the screen in a surprisingly short time.
I used the challenge of a request to speak on the Today programme they didnt realise Id had a stroke when they asked, an unusual five days ahead to force me to bring my speech back on line. Ive never felt as proud as I did when I fooled however many were listening that Saturday into thinking I was well.
And now? I look much the same, I speak just a little more indistinctly and to all external appearances the stroke hasnt changed me except that Im not the person I was before. I have a new, non-patronising empathy with the truly disabled; I now know why those taps in the disabled loo are shaped like that.
Its been extraordinarily humbling to be asked to speak to stroke associations and meet others who have battled through to rescue a life from a stroke. And boring, ordinary things writing, reading, talking, walking are suddenly no longer boring or ordinary, but a gift and a privilege. The sad fact for Andrew Marr is that so much of his recovery will depend on the hospital he is in, and how much he and his family know about strokes. The good news is that a full recovery is possible.
Do I have any broader conclusions? Inevitably I do, though I can claim no medical validation for them. For instance, Ive now met and talked to hundreds of stroke victims. I dont think normal stress the stress of a hard job, the stress an actor or performer feels as they wait in the wings, the stress of driving through rush hour causes strokes. But I wonder at how many people Ive met whove had strokes and who had been going through deep emotional stress, such as a death, divorce or a child going off the rails; the type of stress that leaves you questioning who and what you are as a human being.
I am haunted by the thought of how many people might have returned to normal life had they known about the brains plasticity and rerouting capacity, but who instead are in wheelchairs or permanently disabled in a life-changing way. I am angry at how little I knew about strokes, despite recent noble efforts, and at how long it took me to move from denial to recognition of what was actually happening in my brain and my body. I am angry, too, at how, despite major advances in the general level of awareness, so many people still seem not to know what a stroke is, what causes it and what to do if you have one.
Why do I seem to know many more men who have suffered strokes than women? Im convinced lack of sleep is a factor, and that bad diet and alcohol are contributors. Im also convinced that we store up stress, and lead lifestyles that dont always allow us to vent the load we build. Are strokes just bad luck? Well, yes, of course: but we all help make our own luck.
One other thought worries me. Dragging yourself back from a stroke hurts, physically and mentally. I didnt need a kind nurse to take me through my rehab: I needed a bully, and because there wasnt one I had to bully myself, at twice the strain. It seems a strange thing to say, but the avoidance of pain is sometimes too deeply embedded in our medical culture. We need to recognise that sometimes it has to hurt if youre going to get better, and sometimes the patient needs to be driven rather than carried.
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Martin Stephen: I had a stroke of good luck with my stroke