Well, my stroke was in fact a brain haemorrhage. And, it came upon me without any warning. And I think the most extraordinary thing about it was that it wasn't as if there was any activity I was doing which was likely, or would have been thought likely, to endanger me. I was working very hard. I was approaching my sixtieth year and I wasn't working any harder particularly than I had over a long period of time. But one day I travelled to the North West of England and broke my train journey in order to see and old friend.
I was sitting in her kitchen drinking a cup of coffee and suddenly in the middle of drinking this cup of coffee I became aware that I was loosing my ability to articulate. I didn't know what had happened. In fact I was completely confused and bemused by it. But, the friend of mine who I was sitting with immediately got on her mobile phone to the emergency services and said that, she thought, she was very sorry, but she thought that the person she was just sitting with was having a stroke. And it was at that moment that I thought, “My goodness, is this what's happening to me?”
Anyway her quickness and her general speed and alacrity of response helped me enormously because it got me into, onto an operating table much faster, I think, than is normally the case. But it think what I take away from that myself is that it is possible to be very ill indeed, suddenly without, even looking back on it, without any warning sign. And I suppose the reason is that what I had wrong with me was very high blood pressure which I now realise having examined this many times doesn't necessarily have any tell tale symptoms. You know, no sort of, no heart flutters, no things like that, no, you know, no obvious precursors to what in the end was a very severe illness. |
