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Stroke Survivor

Stroke Survivor

A Personal Guide to Recovery

Andy McCann
Forewords by Robin Sieger and The Stroke Association

Paperback: £15.99 / $25.95

2006, 234mm x 156mm / 9.25in x 6in, 256pp
ISBN: 978-1-84310-410-0, BIC 2: VFJD MQT MQV

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Extract from Chapter 1

Stroke in Context

'As I have sometimes joked, life comes without an instruction manual – and yet we are born with innate abilities to overcome its challenges.'

Robin Sieger, Natural Born Winners (2004), p.xiii

There is a time of significant challenge in everyone's life. A time when faith, values, compassion, patience and pure determination are tested to the limit. At such a time, life itself may seem very unfair. Suffering a stroke is such a time.

Simply speaking, when there is an interruption of blood to part of the heart muscle, an individual suffers what is known as a heart attack; when there is an interruption of blood to part of the brain, an individual suffers what is known as a stroke. In the latter, this disruption of the blood supply results in parts of the brain, which is the most delicate organ in the body, becoming damaged or destroyed. The symptoms of stroke should, therefore, quite clearly have the same alarming significance in being identified that acute chest pain has in identifying a heart attack. In fact, many doctors believe that to have the best chance of limiting damage, strokes should be heeded even more urgently than heart attacks. While I go into much greater detail about the physiology of stroke in Part II, I think that it is worth placing this biological event in context right here, at the beginning of the book.

Every year, some 15 million people suffer a stroke. Generally speaking, one third of people who have an initial stroke die within a year. As a result, stroke is the third leading cause of death in developed countries, behind heart disease and cancer. Talking in figures of millions like this, it becomes very easy to feel remote from the implications, and indeed the reality, of stroke. Perhaps it would be easy to think of it like this: if you are reading this and living in the UK, during the next 60 minutes 12 people will have a stroke. Four of these will recover, four will have permanent disabilities and four will die. If you are living in the US, someone will have a stroke in the time you will take to read this page, and within the last three minutes, while you have opened this book and found your page, someone will have died of a stroke. These 'time/stroke' cycles are constantly repeating 24 hours a day, seven days a week…you will have the idea by now.