Weird Things: What Happened to My Words After Stroke
- Maya Kuzalti
- Apr 16
- 2 min read
“Let’s run and cash the bush.”
My daughter looked at me. “Mum, that’s not right.”
She was seven. And she’d noticed before I had.
That was one of the first times I realised something was off — not stroke off, not hospital off, but quietly off. The kind of off that doesn’t show up on a scan.
Since my stroke, I’ve noticed what I can only call weird things. Little glitches. Quirks that don’t quite fit any diagnosis I’ve been given. Like the time I was out for coffee with a friend and after about three hours, my words started slurring. No wine — just tiredness.
She didn’t say anything. I noticed she was being careful with me.
That was worse, somehow.
I started paying close attention. And I found a pretty clear pattern: the more tired I was, the more garbled my words got. My husband confirmed it — he’d been noticing for a while.
The reading thing caught me completely off guard. In those early weeks after my stroke, I thought: perfect time to catch up on my reading pile. I’d always been an avid reader. So I picked up a novel — one I’d already read, just to make it easy — and looked at the page.
The words made no sense. Not in a can’t-concentrate way. In a the-symbols-aren’t-connecting way. I could text just fine. Short things were no problem. But more than a page? Nothing landed.
I didn’t know what to call it. I just filed it under weird.
Then I went to a conference about life after stroke. And something shifted.
Other survivors started talking — about fatigue-induced aphasia, about acalculia, about temporary alexia. Nearly all of them said the same thing: these symptoms appeared six to twelve months after the stroke, quietly, and were never picked up in standard follow-up care. You’d only find out if you could afford to go looking — or if you happened to be in a room like this one.
So they’d built their own vocabulary for it. Named things themselves. Passed the words around like a shared secret.
That’s when I understood: the weird things aren’t actually that weird. They’re just not documented in the places doctors look.
Peer support gave me more useful information than any clinical appointment I’d had — not because the doctors weren’t good, but because they hadn’t lived it. There’s a kind of knowledge that only comes from the inside.
These days I’m back to my reading addiction. My kids have started complaining about it, which I take as a very good sign. I still garble my words sometimes — usually around hour three of anything — but now I know why. And knowing why makes it manageable.
Weird things can be temporary. They can also be permanent. They may never make it into a clinical textbook.
That doesn’t mean they’re not real.
If you're interested in reading more about research, here are the links to sources:
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