STEVES STORY 

 
I had been fit all my life and at 55 I could still fit into the same clothes I wore 30 years earlier.  
You could count the number of days I’d had off work over the last 10 years on one hand.I loved my job as a HGV Driver. I had always loved driving so this really was my dream job. 
One weekend in September 2014 I was unwell with a bug so I had decided that I had to take Monday off work. By tea time I was feeling better so rang my boss to say I would be back at work on Tuesday. I don’t remember anything beyond that. One minute I was fine laughing and joking with my wife who for some reason wasn’t working her usual Monday evening shift that day. The next minute I had collapsed, stopped breathing and was completely unresponsive. 
My wife immediately started CPR and rang for an ambulance.The ambulance crew arrived quickly to and they worked for 45 minutes to stabilize me before taking me to hospital. 
The doctors told my wife and family to expect the worst as they had found an aneurysm in my brain that had burst so the prognosis was not good. 
They took me up to the specialist neurosurgery unit at the Royal Victoria hospital where I deteriorated and after several surgeries I was put under deep sedation and on a ventilator in intensive care. At some point over the first few days it became apparent that the bleeding in the brain had also caused a stroke but nobody would know how badly I would be affected until I woke up, if I woke up. 
5 weeks later I was wheeled out of ICU. I was completely paralysed down my right side and unable to sit or stand or use my right arm. The worst thing was not being able to talk at all. I tried and tried but I couldn’t get the words from my brain to my mouth. All that came out were strange noises and swear words. 
I improved over the next 6 weeks on the stroke ward with the help of the physio and speech therapy they provided. By the time I came home I could walk a few steps with help and communicate well enough to be understood. 
 

But what about my job and my car. Would I ever get back to driving? I eventually resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn’t ever get back to driving my beloved lorry but I was determined to at least get back to driving a car. It was frustrating waiting for decisions by doctors and the dvla and then training to use special adaptations before eventually, more than a year after my stroke, I was finally in possession of my own specially adapted car. I felt like I had been given my life back. I still can’t use my right arm at all and my right leg is very weak but I feel very lucky because I am one of the 4% of people who are not left bedbound after the kind of stroke I had and I’m lucky that my wife didn’t work the evening shift on Monday the 8th of September 2014. I’m lucky that there have been dedicated community teams who have helped me to regain my mobility and speech. And I’m lucky to be able to do what I can to raise money for those teams so they can continue to help others to feel lucky too.