November 2022. I was moving depot with the lads at work. I turned to Toby, said, “this is heavy,” and the next thing I knew… I was somewhere else.
Literally.
I’d “teleported” to the new depot — standing in the boardroom, gripping the top of a filing cabinet. Toby was holding me. Adam was asking if I was alright. I had no idea what had just happened. I felt numb, confused, like someone had hit the mute button on reality. But I said I was fine. Danny drove me home.
On the way, my face went numb. Then freezing cold. About an hour later, my head started pounding. I got home, dazed, took some painkillers and went to sleep.
Next morning, I felt great, mornings always do that. I turned to my wife and saw the fear in her eyes. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, I feel good,” I said. Then she touched my cheek.
“I think we need to go to the hospital.”
I thought something was wrong with her. “Why, what’s up? Are you alright?”
Then I tried to move, and it hit me. My right arm wasn’t working. Jerky. Shaking. Useless. She showed me my face in the mirror. The right side wasn’t moving. My cheek was heavy, pulling my eye and mouth down, I could not lift them even when smiling.
“Let’s go to the hospital,” I said.
At A&E, they did an MRI. Turns out I’d had a stroke. Not that day, sometime before. What I’d experienced the day before was a “migraine.” That’s what they said anyway. But they kept me in for a week. Then they sent me home.
No follow-up, No stroke team, No support, Just a sick note.
They put me on statins, clopidogrel, and lansoprazole. That was it. I lasted a week on the statins, they wiped me out. Zero energy. My doctor thought they were the problem, so we switched to another type. They were better, sort of, I still believe it was Post Stroke Fatigue. But I was still stuck, waiting to hear from the hospital about getting cleared to go back to work.
Thing is, my GP couldn’t sign me off, it had to come from the hospital. Except the hospital didn’t see me. No face-to-face. Just a phone call, sometime late January or early February 2023. That’s when I was declared “fit to return to work.” Luckily I had a great and supportive work partner “The Man” . He was an unbelievable support despite him having no understanding, he was there and always ready to help me with anything I needed.
But I wasn’t ready.
That wasn’t me anymore. That was me pretending to be the old me, which was impossible. What I now know is that I was living with post-stroke fatigue, tremors, spasms, emotional lability, cognitive overload, stress responses firing off randomly, and full-blown brain farts. Sleep became the most important thing in my life… and I had no idea.
I didn’t know this was medical. I thought I was just unfit. Weak. So I started walking, thinking I had to rebuild. I didn’t realise rest was actually my best friend. But walking became my second best. It helped, with the tremors, the emotions, and that weird internal pressure I couldn’t name.
But then the crying started. No trigger. I’d be fine, even happy, and suddenly I’d be in tears. Or I’d feel terrified for no reason. Trapped. Vulnerable, or euphoric. Or totally detached. These emotions would just arrive like uninvited guests, one after another.
I didn’t understand it. I just knew something had changed and no one had warned me what this part of stroke recovery would feel like.
December 2023 – Stop.
I had been telling myself I was managing. Truth is, I was spiraling. As long as today wasn’t worse than yesterday, that was the rule I lived by. But what I was really doing was surviving a brutal, undulating rollercoaster of fatigue I couldn’t step off.
My task that day was simple: get A and put it in B, then get C and put it in D.
But I didn’t. I got A and put it in B. Then I got C… and put it in B again.
Even writing that now makes me cry uncontrollably.
To the company, it was a small cost. A financial error. To me, it was everything. I watched myself do something I would never choose to do, and I was powerless to stop it. That broke something inside me. My confidence. My belief in who I am.
This was my mistake. But the real wound was deeper: questions became hard to answer, recall vanished, and every query triggered an emotional response before I could compute the logic. I didn’t see the stroke. I didn’t want to. I thought I had prostate cancer. Early-onset dementia. I begged my doctor to check for both.
But I was still asking, and answering, the wrong questions. I was still in denial.
Another admission I need to make, about answering the wrong questions.
Because my face had returned. Because I could walk. Because my right side seemed okay, when rested. And because I’m driven, stubborn, and determined, I didn’t answer honestly when my GP asked, “What’s wrong?”
I normalized the strange movements, the pain, the tremors. I ignored the extra strain on my left side. My left arm and leg had taken over the heavy lifting, and that overcompensation caused its own pain. My answer was vague: “All over.”
So, my GP referred me to physiotherapy. That’s where I met a brilliant man, the first person who really looked at me. After assessing me (when I was rested), he said the words I didn’t expect but needed:
“This is likely neurological. Possibly stroke-related.”
He referred me to a neurologist. But before that appointment even arrived, everything broke.
I was at work, shaking for two days straight. My right shoulder was in agony, the tremors had returned full force, my leg wouldn’t settle. My emotions were like a live wire. I snapped. I did something I never do:
I shouted. I lost control and yelled at a medical professional on the phone. I demanded action. Right there. Right then.
That moment, that breakdown, was the beginning of my recovery.
Within a week, SuperNat (SN) appeared. She was calm. Competent. Reassuring. She explained everything: Post-stroke fatigue. Tremors. Pain. Emotional lability. Cognitive overload. Autonomic stress responses. Even the toilet urgency and the swallowing problems I couldn’t explain. She saw it all, and named it.
She referred me for speech therapy, fatigue management, and psychology.
And that’s where I met CatMouse (CM). In just six hours, this woman gave me something I hadn’t had since the stroke: control. She taught me how to feel without drowning. How to respond instead of reacting. The release I experienced working with her was euphoric. Like coming up for air after being underwater for well over a year. I felt cured.
I was walking five miles a day. Work felt good. My emotions still flared, but I had tools now. The crying stopped. The rollercoaster paused. But the truth is, there’s no cure. My old self isn’t coming back. And that becomes clear when the right (or wrong) set of circumstances align: the stress hits, the emotions explode, and I pop like a bubble. Everything comes at once, and I can’t remember what I said or did, even when someone shows me a video, I see and hear me but have no memory of it. Is that failure, that’s the new reality, that’s the new me.
So, back on the rollercoaster I go. I hope to see CM soon. I keep trying to remember what she did, what she said, but I can’t. So for now, I cling on. I cling to the fear that makes me question every decision. To the speech that can’t express what I mean, the frustration. To the tremors that fire pain through the right of my body, without warning.
