Blindsided Read online

  Not just that—once I was in hospital, I had several great networks of friends looking out for me, visiting me, communicating with hundreds of well-wishers from all over the world on my behalf. And as if that wasn’t enough, another network of fantastic people had thought nothing of dropping everything to help Isabella and the boys back at home. Who gets that kind of good fortune? I got it—it really was amazing.

  Equally, I couldn’t help thinking how differently everything could have turned out. What if I’d had the stroke in the hotel in Singapore before I even got to Brisbane? I could have had a headache at dinner and gone up to my room. Then what? I would have been in serious trouble. I’d have been in a strange city, miles from people who knew me.

  Worse still, imagine if I’d had the stroke on a flight? Then what do you do? The possible outcome there isn’t even worth considering. I definitely don’t think I’d be here, writing this book.

  SO, HAVING ANALYSED HOW very lucky I was in every conceivable respect, from that moment on I set my mind to finding a way to help people who hadn’t walked away from a stroke as well as I had. I didn’t know what that formula would be at that point, but I knew that if I continued to think about it, something would evolve in the months ahead.

  It wasn’t the last time I’d feel pangs of guilt, of course. I think that’s a process that everyone who survives a stroke goes through. You go with it, acknowledge the emotions you feel and try to find a way to channel them positively rather than letting the guilt consume you. Yes, I wanted to help people—that’s great. But how was I going to actually do it? The answers would come to me in time.

  EIGHTEEN

  REUNION

  THERE ARE A FEW questions you ask yourself in the aftermath of a stroke. One of them for me was: ‘Why did my artery split the way it did?’

  It was a question that I asked myself many times in the quiet hours when I was staying at Mum and Dad’s. I still wonder sometimes. People might assume that a career playing contact sport must have weakened something and led to a situation where the artery was prone to dissection. But I’ve been told that’s not likely. What’s more probable is that my artery rupture was caused by a perfect storm of circumstances.

  There’ll never be a cut-and-dried answer and it’s probably easier to move forward that way. I’d stopped playing in 1998 and the doctors felt that if rugby had contributed to the traumatic event of stroke there would have been symptoms at that time.

  I’ve learned that neurologists are a practically minded bunch. They focus on what’s actually presented in the scans on the day they are taken. They won’t speculate on what may or may not have been happening in the background, because it just doesn’t matter. Neurologists deal in fact, in reality, and in those terms all that mattered was that my artery split. Their concern was how to limit the damage.

  As I’ve said, the cause was likely to have been a combination of a few seemingly more mundane factors. I was sleep-deprived, jetlagged, probably dehydrated, and had been vigorously swinging a golf club. All these factors—topped off by that single unforeseeably traumatic moment when I choked and coughed on the beer—were probably enough to cause the artery to split. I couldn’t have predicted it and certainly couldn’t have protected myself against it. It was simply one of those events that blindsides you. All you can do is hope you survive to tell the story. Hope it’s not your turn to go.

  But I couldn’t help recalling a few episodes I’d experienced in the year or so prior to the stroke. ‘What was all that about?’ I wondered.

  I can only describe them as dizzy turns, and they only happened occasionally. Whenever they did, I’d be puzzled as to the cause, although I don’t think I was ever concerned enough to mention it to Isabella. I thought, ‘I’ll be fine,’ never, ‘Oh hell, here comes a stroke.’

  Commonly, it would happen when I stood up after I’d been lying down for a while. The room would spin for a few seconds and it would take me a few more to get my orientation again. Sometimes, when I was lying down in bed, the room would spin as if I’d had too much to drink. It was a strange sensation. But then it would go away.

  I just put it down to my stressful lifestyle: long hours at work, not enough sleep, maybe—it was nothing to get worried about and certainly not worth a trip to the doctor. But I do remember asking Rob Henderson in our initial conversations if there was any likely connection to the artery splitting. ‘Was that a warning?’ I was aware of the concept of the mini-stroke: a minor stroke, or series of strokes, that can be almost unnoticeable. They can happen to anyone at any age and are often considered a precursor to something major.

  Rob’s response was that he couldn’t even begin to consider whether these incidents were related to the stroke. The absence of scan images prior to the stroke made speculation pointless. There may have been a slight defect, but, equally, there may not have been. It’s just impossible to tell after the event.

  ISABELLA LYNAGH: Michael never mentioned any serious prior health issues to me, because if he had, I would have been the first person to suggest that he should go and see a doctor. In the months prior to the stroke, however, I did notice that he was very stressed and prone to outbursts of anger and frustration, and I remember thinking that something bad could happen during one of these because of the inevitable rise in blood pressure. That’s the only thought I ever had. Michael can take things pretty seriously sometimes and can get worked up about things that I don’t necessarily think are important. As a result, he’d get himself in a bit of a mental ‘hole’ of negativity quite easily when he felt something was going against him.

  Any time I went back to Royal Brisbane Hospital for a follow-up scan, I’d take the opportunity to quiz Rob Henderson on the specifics of what had happened in my head. To his credit, he always had time for me. I wasn’t his only patient and he’d dealt with hundreds of cases like mine. I just needed to understand as much as I possibly could. And, three years later, there are still aspects of the stroke that I’m not completely clear about. I still email Rob now and again with questions—‘So what exactly is that white area I’m seeing in the scan image?’

  Initially I just wanted to know what the prognosis for my vision was. Was this it? Was I always going to be missing the left side of my field of vision? Would it improve? Could it get worse?

  Rob had no definitive answers for that and the reason he didn’t is that there aren’t any. Generally speaking, damage caused by a stroke that affects the occipital lobe—the part of the brain that controls vision—is not reversible. That said, some people in my situation have experienced improvements over time. For the first few weeks I used to close my eyes at night, hoping that I’d wake up in the morning to find my sight had improved. Sometimes I’d think it actually had. When I asked Rob about it, he was always circumspect, and that I understand.

  When you think about it, your brain has to go through a complex series of adjustments following a stroke. That won’t happen overnight. But gradually, the brain will find a way to compensate for impaired vision, for example. Your eyesight might not be any better, but it might seem to be better because of the compensation going on. Even that is good. I’ll take that.

  During one of the many follow-up scans I had after I’d left hospital, we were very concerned to be told that there was a tiny area of new stroke showing up on the images. It hadn’t caused any new symptoms and it was located in an area on the other side of the back of my brain called the right visual cortex. I certainly had not been aware of any pain or discomfort that might have indicated something new happening.

  DR HENDERSON: We do it [follow-up scans] to establish the safety of the artery, and Michael had a few more scans than most people get because of his medical history. Also, we didn’t exactly expect him to be out playing golf so soon after. But one scan showed a tiny, new area of stroke. I showed Michael’s pictures to quite a few well-known neurologists down in Melbourne who were following his progress with interest. All the new scan made us do was change his medication from u
sing aspirin to clopidigrel—an oral anti-platelet agent used to inhibit blood clots. When I showed another guy the scan he said, ‘If you scan anyone within a two-week period, you’ll probably always find a couple of little tiny strokes.’ He [Michael] wouldn’t have noticed anything; it was just a tiny dot on the scan to keep people on their toes. This was the second-last scan before he could fly, given that we normally like to allow a month from a stroke from a flying viewpoint.

  Because I couldn’t fly for a certain period after my stroke, I ended up being in Australia much longer than I’d intended. Originally I was to be there for three days, but it ended up being six weeks. Rather than waiting any longer, Isabella and I decided it would be great if she came out to visit me. She arranged for one of our many helpful friends back home to look after the kids for ten days or so.

  When she arrived in mid-May, it was an incredibly emotional reunion. We hugged and we just couldn’t let go; she commented on how skinny I was. ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ she said. I think that was one of the moments when I realised just what we’d all been through. She was clearly exhausted, as I was, but to be back together seemed to give me renewed energy.

  ISABELLA LYNAGH: When Michael met me at the airport, I couldn’t believe how much weight he’d lost. I just could not let go of him. We’ve never been a very publicly affectionate couple. We don’t kiss and hold hands in public all the time, but during the ten days we spent together in Brisbane, I don’t think I ever let his hand go. The whole event made us both realise how important life is and we’ve been a lot more affectionate ever since.

  On one of her first days in Brisbane, I had a scan scheduled at the hospital. After the previous slightly worrying one, when the new speck of stroke damage showing on the scan had given us a few tense moments, it was vital to my hopes of flying home that my scan was indicative of stability.

  We went in, I had the scan and then sat in the office waiting for the results while Isabella waited a little nervously in the corridor. Then one of the nurses came in and said, ‘Wait here, the doctors want to see you.’ I was thinking to myself, ‘This can’t be good. If everything was fine, surely they’d just tell me.’ Five minutes later, Rob Henderson came into the office and said, ‘Everything’s fine.’ It was a great moment. We sat there chatting for what turned into forty minutes and finally he said, ‘Shouldn’t you go and tell your wife?’ I said, ‘Oh my God, yes!’

  I went out and told Isabella the good news. She’d been sitting there worried. As we left and were saying goodbye to Rob, he said to Isabella, ‘Now go and buy your husband a very nice glass of wine.’ We went home, got dressed up and went out for a beautiful dinner with my parents. It was a significant step in the right direction.

  A couple of days later we decided that we wanted to get away for a bit, so we booked into a hotel in Noosa, a beautiful beach resort up the coast from Brisbane. I thought it would be a nice change of scene for me. It sounds ridiculous but I was actually wary of telling my parents what we were planning because I knew they’d disapprove, thinking I was overdoing it. In the end, I explained to them that I’d just be sitting in the passenger seat while Isabella drove the rental car for the ninety-minute journey to Noosa. I said, ‘It’s no more strenuous than sitting in the house. I’ll be fine.’ After a little more reassuring they were okay about it so Isabella and I took off and spent a few days relaxing in Noosa Heads.

  It was the first time since leaving hospital that I’d had a proper chance to decompress. We walked on the beach every day, had nice meals. It was here that I really started to realise how great it was to be alive. I’d battled to improve my physical abilities and tested myself every day for weeks in all manner of disciplines. I’d walked; I’d tested my sight in every way I could. Now I just needed time to reflect and to relax with Isabella. It occurred to me that everything was going to turn out well.

  The night before I flew back home to London, I asked the guys who’d been with me in Friday’s on the night of the stroke if they wanted to go out again. I said, ‘Guys, we’re going to finish this. And do it in a better way than last time.’ Last time I went out for a beer, I ended up in hospital for almost two weeks. I needed closure of some kind. I also needed that whole sequence of my life to end on a positive note.

  They agreed, and when we met at Friday’s I said, ‘This time I actually want to get through it’, and with that I took a sip from a little seven-ounce beer. For me it felt good and, more importantly, for those guys too I thought it would be nice for them to see me healthy before I headed back home. It had been a traumatic experience for them as well.

  I flew back to London on May 30th 2013, six weeks after I had arrived.

  NINETEEN

  BACK TO WORK

  AFTER I GOT BACK from Australia and all the euphoric ‘I’m home! Wasn’t it great that we beat it!’ stuff had died down, there came a moment when I had to accept that life simply goes on. Everybody was really happy to see me—of course they were—but then, one day, it felt as if they were looking at me and thinking, ‘He’s over it now. There’s nothing wrong with him. Life goes on.’

  To a certain extent, that was true. I know that. But one of the things I found, and still find, frustrating about my situation is that to look at me nobody would even know that I’d had a stroke. I look the same; I sound the same. You wouldn’t know. But I know. I had a stroke and my vision is impaired as a result. I had a stroke when my artery split and my brain became swollen. It happened. Life has changed for me. I don’t see like I used to. I can no longer drive a car. That’s not easy after thirty years, especially with three young boys needing to be ferried around at weekends. There are also a lot of other things that are affected: golf, riding a bike, surfing—all pastimes that are important to me.

  So sometimes I wish I could wear a sign around my neck—‘Stroke victim! I can’t see very well!’—for all the people who get pissed off when I accidentally bump into them on the Underground. I actually get a fright myself because I genuinely don’t see people coming. Despite that, I get the impression that there are some members of the general public, even some friends, who when they meet me think, ‘Well, what was all the fuss about? Look at him. There’s nothing wrong with him. It must have been a really minor stroke.’

  Certainly when I first came home I really did get the feeling that some people thought I’d made a bit of a fuss about nothing. Built it up much bigger than what it was. I certainly hadn’t. It was never my intention to be even remotely public about what had happened. At the time when the story was in the papers and on TV I thought: ‘It must be a really slow news week if I’m in the front pages.’

  I talked about the stroke and recovery a lot during that first month back home. People wanted to know. We’d have friends round for dinner and the first question was always, ‘So, tell us what happened . . .’

  I’d tell them the story in a fair bit of detail, to the point where I actually got pretty good at telling it. A little bit of humour here and there and you brush it off. It’s easier to see the humorous side of situations when you’ve survived them.

  But when I talked about the incredible people I’d met, the neurologists, the nurses, the guy who cleans the blood off the ward floor every day, people were eerily quiet. I’d say, ‘What’s wrong?’ And they always said, ‘Don’t you mind talking about this stuff?’ I’d say, ‘Not at all!’ Part of me needed to talk about it, to remind me of what I’d survived.

  But I always said to Isabella, ‘If I ever start going on too long about this and people are getting bored, please tell me.’ You know what it’s like when people talk far too much about anything.

  Take skiing, for example. Don’t get me wrong, skiing’s nice—I like skiing. But I don’t want to hear about it for hours on end. I don’t think anybody does. When I go surfing, I’m pretty sure I don’t come home and go, ‘Well, the surf was this and this and this . . .’ I prefer to keep it brief. Someone asks, ‘How was the surfing?’ I’ll just say something like, ‘Yeah, w
e had a few good days’, or ‘There was no surf’, unless they ask more. Then I’ll happily bore them for days . . .

  So I was very aware of not boring people with my story, though generally people seemed very interested. A lot of them were my age or even a bit younger, so I’m sure a few were thinking, ‘This could happen to me.’

  But the hardest part of recovery was the coming down from euphoria to deal with the more mundane moments of life. Once you come down, there’s that risk that you keep going down. I definitely understand how people end up getting depressed. I’ve been there, not too badly, but enough to recognise it and to know that the abyss is there and waiting.

  Whenever I felt myself sliding, I said to myself, ‘Don’t even go there, mate. Get out of this.’ That’s my personality. It’s the same trait that, with five minutes to go in a rugby match when you need a try to win, makes you say to yourself, ‘I’m going to find a way to win this—to turn this situation around’, not, ‘Oh, well we can’t win this. We’re out of the World Cup.’ Despite that, I’ve still had more than a few moments where things have got pretty heavy and I’ve thought to myself, ‘I’m not sure if I can get out of this.’

  It’s usually family motivations that have hauled me out of the emotional depths. Looking after the kids, seeing them grow up and enjoying my role as a father, husband and financial provider. I think I hold these roles even more dearly now than I did before the stroke.

  Previously, I might too easily have got caught up in the stresses of life. I think I’m a lot calmer now and I definitely appreciate how much Isabella does for the family. It’s funny, when I first came home I told her, ‘Look, I need to rest as much as possible. So it might be that I need to lie down on the couch most afternoons and sleep.’ She didn’t even blink. She said, ‘Nothing’s changed, then. You used to do that before you had a stroke!’