Stroke Recovery

The economic case for lived experience has already been made - just not here, yet. The meeting wasn’t unkind. They rarely are. The patient voice tends to be item seven on the agenda, somewhere between communications update and any other business. Eighteen months on from the stroke, in one of the research institutions that has invited me in as a lay stakeholder, I have been in enough of these rooms now to know that the slot on the agenda is the slot in the structure. Item seve

On starting over after stroke — and why I've stopped calling it starting over My stroke came at one of the most stressful points in my career. I didn't love what I was doing. I knew I wanted something different — something entrepreneurial, something that felt like mine — but I couldn't quite land on what. There were ideas. The AI bandwagon was right there, ready, beckoning. I was good at it. I could have jumped on. But my body intervened. My brain, actually — which has its ow

On why burnout might be the push you didn't know you needed There's a particular kind of tired that isn't fixed by sleep. I know, because I've felt it. That Sunday-evening feeling that starts creeping in around 4pm — the dread that settles in your chest before the week has even begun. The kind of tired where you're sitting in a meeting and you genuinely cannot remember why any of this matters. Where you're ticking things off a list, performing competence, going through every

I filed neuroplasticity under jargon. I was wrong. The biology behind why the story isn't over — written by a stroke survivor.

By coffee number ten, I'd finally managed to pour the milk in the right cup. My six-year-old helped. She didn't make a big deal of it. A week later, I thought I'd cracked it — only to drop the whole cup when I lifted it with my stroke hand. And I just stood there in my kitchen, surrounded by the mess, thinking: Sisyphus. Pushing the boulder up the mountain. Watching it roll back down. Getting up tomorrow and doing it all again. That's the thing nobody tells you when you sign

When a stroke happens to you, it also happens to everyone around you — and almost nobody talks about what comes next for them.

If you see me out and about, I probably look fine. That’s all down to a little post-stroke sleight of hand. Stroke survivors become very good at putting on a show for public appearances. We rest beforehand. We plan. We arrive with our game face on. You see the polished hour, but you don’t see the horizontal recovery that follows at home. Post-stroke fatigue is a real disability. It’s a silent one, and one that people rarely ever know about. When people outside our home see us

A stroke survivor shares why she's pursuing a neuroscience degree while managing recovery, family life, and building tools to help others navigate healing.

I remember being pregnant with my first. The excitement about finally meeting him. The terror of what I would do without an operating manual to help me through. The acceptance that the next few years of my life would be spent craving more sleep than I would ever get. What I wasn’t prepared for was the heavy weight of guilt that comes along with every child. Literally from day one. Did we get the right car seat? Will he be safe? Am I holding him right? Why won’t he fee

I tried to have it all—brilliant career, perfect motherhood, flawless home. Then my stroke forced me to learn a better way. You don't need it all to be happy.

Lived experience matters. Peer Support: A Real Route To Representation.

Recovering from a stroke is a journey that's physical, cognitive, mental and more... Three years ago, I told a neurologist that I woke up...

Fighting for continuity of care. Becoming your own best friend.