My stroke happened in November 2020.

It was during COVID, and I was still going into the office. Almost nobody else was there.

One day I went to use the bathroom and, all of a sudden, I lost my eyesight.

Completely.

It came back moments later.

And somehow my reaction was basically:

Well, wasn’t that weird?

Looking back now, that should have been a giant flashing warning sign.

At the time, I shrugged it off.

Nothing else really happened for the rest of the workday, so I drove home.

That drive was about an hour and a half.

Yes, I drove an hour and a half after temporarily losing my vision.

I know.

Not exactly one of my smarter decisions.

Then Things Got Worse

I got home, had dinner, and made myself a drink.

My wife and I decided to watch a movie.

At some point during the movie, I dropped my drink.

I tried to pick the ice cubes up and put them back into the glass.

I couldn’t.

I kept missing.

Then I tried to talk.

What I was trying to say in my head was not what was coming out of my mouth.

It was gibberish.

It sounded like another language.

My brilliant plan at that point was to go to bed.

Thankfully, my wife had a better plan.

She stopped me because she knew something was seriously wrong.

She wanted to call 911.

Somehow I managed to get the word “no” out.

So she drove me to the hospital.

We lived about a mile away.

Looking back, yes, that was dumb too.

If you think you are having a stroke, call 911.

The Emergency Room

My wife dropped me at the emergency room entrance and went to park the car.

I could still walk.

I went inside and tried to tell the person at the desk that I thought I was having a stroke.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t talk properly, and I had alcohol on my breath from the drink I had made at home.

So at first, they thought I was drunk.

My wife came in a few minutes later and explained what had actually happened.

Things moved pretty quickly after that.

They still tested my blood alcohol level.

Yes, I had been drinking.

No, I was nowhere near legally intoxicated.

They started doing neurological checks.

Follow this with your eyes.

Smile.

Move this.

Lift that.

Then my face started drooping.

I remember a nurse telling me to squeeze his fingers as hard as I could.

In my head, I was yelling:

I AM! I AM!

But apparently my body wasn’t cooperating.

Now several people were looking at me.

My wife too.

They were all trying to determine whether one side of my face was drooping.

It was.

I was having a stroke.

When It Finally Hit Me

I don’t remember the exact order of everything after that.

There were scans.

There were medications.

I was given a clot-busting treatment, although I honestly don’t remember exactly which medication they used.

I remember being told afterward that because of the bleeding risk, I was not going to be allowed to get out of bed for a while.

That was the moment when it really sank in.

WTF. This is serious.

And I couldn’t communicate.

That may have been the scariest part.

I knew what I wanted to say.

I knew what I wanted to ask.

I just couldn’t get the words out.

Luckily, the hospital staff that day was excellent.

Between my wife recognizing something was wrong and the medical team acting quickly, I have no doubt they changed the outcome for me.

They may have saved my life.

Then Came All the Tests

I had several scans of my head.

There is nothing quite like spending a long time inside a scanner when you can’t communicate properly.

Thankfully, I’m not claustrophobic.

Then my kidneys decided to join the party.

My kidney function dropped significantly while I was hospitalized.

That was my first experience with a nephrologist.

There were more tests.

Eventually, my kidney function improved to around 50 percent.

Looking back at everything I know now, I sometimes wonder if that was around the time my right kidney stopped functioning normally.

I didn’t follow up with nephrology as well as I probably should have.

My primary care doctor took the lead for a while.

I had enough other problems being discovered.

They found atrial fibrillation.

They found sleep apnea.

And then they tried putting me on the hospital CPAP machine.

This thing looked like it was approximately the size of a Volkswagen.

My CPAP today is about the size of a shoebox.

Whatever prehistoric machine they brought into that hospital room was not happening.

I already had so much going on that I basically said:

We’ll deal with that later.

I Was Also Over 400 Pounds

Have I mentioned that I was fat?

When all of this happened, I was tipping the scales at somewhere around 410 pounds.

My diabetes was poorly controlled.

My blood pressure was high.

My cholesterol was terrible.

My triglycerides were so high that at one point they couldn’t even calculate them normally.

So now you have a 400-pound guy lying flat in a hospital bed while they are pumping fluids into him.

Which means one thing.

I had to pee.

A lot.

Because I had received clot-busting treatment, they weren’t letting me just get out of bed whenever I wanted.

Try being over 400 pounds, lying nearly flat, and attempting to pee into one of those little hospital urinals.

It wasn’t happening.

During the day, my wife helped me.

At night, I had to call the nurses.

I cannot explain how humiliating that felt at the time.

I apologized constantly.

I was embarrassed about my weight.

Embarrassed that I needed help.

Embarrassed that someone had to help me do something as basic as urinating.

Eventually, after a few days, I was allowed to get up and use the bathroom myself.

At that point, that felt like a major victory.

What the Stroke Did to My Brain

The physical problems were only part of it.

The stroke affected my ability to communicate and process information.

At one point, I got my phone back.

I remember wanting to dial a number.

The problem was that I didn’t know what the number 7 was.

I knew how to count.

So I would start at one.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Six.

Seven.

Then I would press what I thought was the seven.

I did that for every digit.

Eventually, I pressed send.

Of course, the number was wrong.

I also couldn’t remember what I had eaten for breakfast.

It was French toast.

I probably asked my wife a hundred times:

What did I have for breakfast again?

French toast.

A few minutes later:

What did I have for breakfast?

French toast.

I couldn’t remember my kids’ names.

They managed to sneak in to see me during COVID restrictions.

I smiled when I saw them.

They were scared.

They were younger then.

And I was only 53 years old.

Teaching Myself to Talk Again

Once I got my phone back, I stayed awake practicing.

For two days I worked on trying to teach myself how to speak again.

By about the third day, I could start getting some words out.

Not great words.

Not necessarily the right words.

But words.

I still couldn’t dial a phone properly.

But I was learning to communicate.

Eventually I was moved out of the ICU and into a regular room.

That felt like progress.

Then came the next battle.

They Wanted to Send Me to Rehabilitation

A few days later, the hospital started talking about sending me to a rehabilitation facility.

I wanted to go home.

They didn’t think that was a particularly good idea.

They asked how many stairs I had in my house.

Like an idiot, I told them the truth.

Thirteen.

So they said I had to prove I could safely go up and down 13 stairs before they would let me go home.

Great.

I had barely walked farther than the bathroom in five or six days.

Now I was going to climb stairs.

At 400 pounds.

After a stroke.

A therapist strapped herself to me before we started.

I remember looking at her and thinking:

Lady, if I go down, you are coming with me.

There was absolutely no way she was catching 400 pounds.

I asked if we could go down first because we were already on an upper floor.

She agreed.

Truthfully, I don’t think anyone expected me to complete the test.

If I couldn’t do the stairs, the decision was easy.

Off to rehab.

It probably took me 15 or 20 minutes just to get down.

Then came the hard part.

Going back up.

I was exhausted.

I was sweating.

My heart rate was apparently going through the roof because people started looking for me after seeing what was happening on my heart monitor.

But I kept going.

One stair at a time.

And I made it.

All thirteen.

I wasn’t going to rehab.

Going Home Was Only the Beginning

A day or so later, I was discharged.

Then the real work started.

I practiced walking.

I practiced talking.

And suddenly I had what felt like a million doctor appointments.

I needed a cardiologist.

A neurologist.

A nephrologist.

Speech therapy.

Physical therapy.

Occupational therapy to make sure I could safely take care of myself.

The cardiologist explained that I had atrial fibrillation.

I started taking Eliquis.

His opinion was that the stroke was most likely caused by previously undiagnosed AFib.

Sleep apnea may also have contributed to the overall cardiovascular picture.

Unfortunately, that cardiologist and I never really clicked.

I felt like all he saw when he looked at me was an extremely overweight guy who was lucky to still be alive.

I was given blood thinners and metoprolol.

We met a couple of times and then scheduled another appointment about six months later.

During those six months, I lost around 80 pounds.

When I went back, his reaction was basically:

Wow. I didn’t think you would actually do that.

Thanks for the confidence.

By then, though, some of the treatment options for getting me back into a normal rhythm were apparently less straightforward.

To this day, I remain in atrial fibrillation essentially all the time.

Therapy Was Brutal

The hardest part for me was therapy.

Not because the exercises looked difficult.

Quite the opposite.

Some of them looked ridiculously simple.

That made it even more frustrating.

They would give me questions like:

You walk into a building.

Go up three floors.

Down one floor.

Then up three more.

What floor are you on?

That sounds easy.

Before the stroke, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought.

After the stroke, exercises like that could completely exhaust me.

The therapy sessions where I had to really use my brain were the worst.

I would finish completely wiped out.

I also had to relearn how to participate in conversations.

Talking with one person was difficult enough.

Talking with two or three people at the same time?

That was an entirely different skill.

I had to learn how to follow who was talking.

Process what they said.

Remember what had already been said.

Formulate my response.

And then actually get the words out.

It took me well over a year before I felt remotely comfortable having normal conversations again.

Going Back to Work Showed Me How Much Had Changed

Eventually, I tried going back to work.

COVID was still going on, and in a strange way that probably helped me.

For the first four to six months, I was able to work from home.

That gave me some protection from the things I was still struggling with.

But I still had meetings.

And meetings became a whole different experience after the stroke.

My memory was so bad that I sometimes couldn’t remember the names of the people I was talking to.

These were people I worked with.

People I knew.

Yet during a meeting, their names could simply disappear from my brain.

So I came up with a workaround.

I put Post-it notes around my computer screen with people’s names on them.

If I was in a meeting with someone, I could glance at the screen and remind myself who I was talking to.

Before the stroke, that would have sounded ridiculous to me.

After the stroke, it was how I got through the day.

And those days wiped me out mentally.

I could sit at a computer all day and look like I hadn’t done anything physically demanding, but my brain felt like it had run a marathon.

Trying to listen.

Trying to remember.

Trying to follow the conversation.

Trying to respond correctly.

Trying not to let anyone see how hard I was working just to do things that had once been automatic.

I desperately wanted to get back to where I had been before the stroke.

I wanted the old me back.

I kept thinking that if I pushed hard enough, worked hard enough, and practiced enough, eventually everything would return to normal.

It didn’t.

And eventually I had to accept that it wasn’t going to.

Aphasia Never Completely Left

I still deal with aphasia today.

My brain mixes up letters.

B and D are big ones.

Throw in some P’s and G’s just to make things interesting.

My texting skills still suck.

Autocorrect saves me constantly.

Just imagine trying to write these articles.

I use voice dictation a lot.

My wife helps me more than I could ever explain.

She has been a godsend through all of my health problems, but especially after the stroke.

I pushed myself very hard during therapy.

Every day I practiced.

I wanted to get back to the person I had been before the stroke.

Eventually, I had to understand something much harder.

That person was gone.

Not dead.

Not destroyed.

But changed.

I could improve.

I could adapt.

I could relearn things.

But there wasn’t going to be a magical morning where I woke up and everything was exactly like it had been before November 2020.

Learning to Do Things Again

After a couple of months of formal therapy, I was eventually released.

I could talk.

I could think reasonably well.

And eventually, I was cleared to drive again.

Driving was a big one for me.

For a while, I couldn’t do much of anything independently.

And I hated asking for help.

Absolutely hated it.

I wanted to do everything myself.

I laugh at that now.

I am very much over that.

Today, I know there are things I simply cannot do without help.

Accepting that has been its own form of rehabilitation.

Trying to Work Again

I couldn’t return to the type of position I had before the stroke.

Eventually, I took an early retirement.

Later I tried working at a school fixing Chromebooks.

The old version of me wanted to do more.

Looking back, I probably should have been satisfied that I was able to work at all.

But while I was working there, another problem began showing itself.

My hips started hurting badly.

Years of carrying more than 400 pounds had taken a toll.

Today, both hips are severely arthritic.

Both are essentially bone-on-bone.

The right is worse than the left.

I now use a walker to get around.

Around the same time, I noticed something else.

Walking to a classroom would leave me sweating profusely.

Not a little sweaty.

Buckets.

Then I started noticing chest pain.

That eventually opened the door to everything that came next with my heart.

If you’ve read other articles on this site, you already know where that road eventually led.

More doctors.

More diagnoses.

Aortic stenosis.

Heart failure.

A valve replacement.

Kidney problems.

And plenty of things I never expected to be dealing with before I turned 60.

The Stroke Was the Beginning of a Different Life

When I look back now, November 2020 feels like the point where my old life ended and this one began.

At the time, I thought surviving the stroke was the finish line.

It wasn’t.

It was the starting line.

I had to relearn how to talk.

How to think.

How to communicate.

How to trust my body.

How to ask for help.

And eventually, how to accept that recovery doesn’t always mean becoming exactly who you were before.

I still have aphasia.

My left foot still doesn’t work normally.

I still become mentally exhausted when I push my brain too hard.

I still type the wrong letters.

I still occasionally know exactly what I want to say and can’t find the damn word.

But I’m still here.

I’m writing.

I’m talking.

I’m driving.

I’m learning.

And somehow, almost six years later, I can look back at the guy who couldn’t remember what he had for breakfast and realize just how far he came.

French toast, by the way.

I finally remembered.