Blindsided Read online

  I joke, but I do recognise that life has become tougher for her. Because I can’t drive, and because I used to do a good share of driving the kids around, that’s put a lot of extra pressure on her. But like I said, she never complains. She does whatever is needed and I often wonder how much all of this has taken out of her. I wish I could discuss it more but I genuinely don’t find that kind of conversation easy. That’s a weakness of mine, I know that, and it’s something I’m committed to work on. Life really is too short not to talk openly with the people you love.

  ISABELLA LYNAGH: Michael has been more affectionate and definitely more grateful [since the stroke]. Overall, I know that he’s definitely more aware of his mortality and I think he’s trying hard to control his moods. He’s definitely more aware of how fragile life is and the fact that he can’t see properly must be a constant reminder. In terms of how it has all affected me, it has been a strain. Michael has always worked, so he wasn’t always there to help anyway. But it is a big strain at the weekends. I have adapted, but I am still suffering. I was so strong for the weeks when Michael was at his lowest, then you realise that you’ve just got nothing left. I still worry about him and all that stress does have physical manifestations for me. I feel like I have post-traumatic stress sometimes. It has to come out somehow. I don’t really talk about these problems with Michael, though. It’s not that he doesn’t recognise what I’m dealing with, because he does. It’s more a case of everyday life taking over.

  For the kids there were adjustments to make. They all seem to have responded very well, although Isabella always says that Thomas, our middle son, felt it most. He’s definitely the most sensitive of the three.

  When I first came home, I made a point of explaining to them, in simple terms, what had happened. But they are kids; it’s asking a lot to expect them to really understand it all. In the end we just reminded them, ‘Daddy can’t see very well on his left side, so be careful how you approach him and what you leave lying around the floor.’ I think they all understood. They even managed to trick me a few times by doing things in the part of my vision that they knew was affected. Sometimes they still do it. Making light of the situation seems to make it easier.

  Seeing fellow stroke survivors has been another huge leveller for me, especially in those moments when I’ve been close to feeling, ‘Why me?’ I’ve been approached by a number of organisations that deal with stroke in some way, in both the UK and Australia. Isabella and I were invited to the Life After Stroke awards lunch in London in 2012, organised by the Stroke Association. It was my first public appearance since the stroke. It was pretty daunting to be around crowds of people. I’d been in contact with the people at the Stroke Association on and off and they wanted me to present an award. The event recognises achievements by people who have survived a stroke and those who give care: volunteers, medical professionals and carers. It’s a cry-athon—there’s no other way of describing it. It’s very emotional. There were two hundred people in the audience and everybody was crying—it was an outpouring of emotion for people who have managed to keep their lives going despite serious disability.

  That day made me view things differently. And it took me one step further down the road that leads away from survivor’s guilt. Part of me, looking at badly afflicted survivors of stroke, still thinks, ‘That could have been me.’ That might always be the case; we’ll see. But there’s a much bigger part of me that now thinks, ‘I had this upside down. I’m not giving to them; they are giving to me.’

  At the lunch I sat next to a young man who’d had a stroke while heading a football. He was in his mid to late thirties, perhaps; he was from Jersey. When he’d gone up to head the ball, his head had collided with his opponent’s head. Initially, he merely felt dizzy, maybe a little concussed, but then he went home and had a full-blown stroke. His speech isn’t great, he can’t write; he’s a youngish guy with a wife and children. He was a writer, and now he has to use his iPad to communicate by typing answers to questions and showing you the screen. He told me that, despite his disabilities, he’d recently run the Jersey marathon in some incredibly long time. That part didn’t matter; it was the fact that he’d finished that meant everything.

  When I hear these people’s stories, I find them incredibly powerful. My pulse quickens when they talk about what they’ve been through. For those few moments I almost forget I’ve been through a similar thing. It’s inspirational to see perfectly normal people who’ve been struck down—their lives changed to the point where they don’t want to go on—turn it around, saying, ‘No, I still have a life. It might not be the one I planned before the stroke, but at least I have it. Many others don’t.’

  It takes a certain type of human being to say that.

  By showing how they can overcome disability and keep going, these people are actually giving to ‘normal’ people by saying, ‘Hey, look what I’ve made of my situation. You think you’ve got it tough?’ They don’t actually say that, of course; they just get on with it. I think it’s magnificent. If I could do that, that would make me feel fulfilled.

  As I’ve mentioned, my problem is that people see me and say, ‘You’re all right.’ I sometimes wish I could tell them more about what I’ve been through, what I’m still going through. I sometimes feel like saying, ‘Spend a day in my shoes’—not that I would wish that on anybody. Because I look ‘normal’ and act ‘normal’, there’s this, ‘Michael’s okay, on to the next one’ attitude. That’s fair, because there are people who need care, assistance and attention an awful lot more than I do.

  But I’m still a stroke survivor. I still feel I have something to offer in these discussions. I have a deep understanding of what these people have been through and huge admiration for what they’ve achieved. I can tell the story too; I can talk to them, sympathise with them and treat them as the people they are.

  One guy, while giving a speech about his stroke, described the feeling of its onset as like getting hit on the back of the head with a baseball bat. I said, ‘That’s it. It’s just how you describe it!’ I used to call it a severe, sudden headache. But it wasn’t just a headache; it was something much more. I thought, ‘I’m going to use that from now on.’ It’s a great description, because everybody can relate to it.

  The Stroke Association lunch reminded me, ‘Jeez, you’ve been through a serious event. But you’ve come through it.’ Every now and then I need reminding of that. It gives me strength. It’s not that I’m bullet-proof; I was just very lucky in terms of where I was, the people I was with and the fact that I wasn’t touched as badly as I could have been. The nature of Life After Stroke events is that you tend to meet people who really need medical services, support and care on a daily basis, whereas somebody like me doesn’t need that.

  There are also many people out there with my level of stroke damage. I’ve met a couple of people who have hemiopia, like I do. I was sitting in the eye doctor’s office one day and the guy opposite me said, ‘I have exactly what you have. It’s great to meet you.’ He had hemiopia on the opposite side. Mine is on the left side; his was on the right. We both actually said, ‘We should go and watch a game of rugby together. We’d cover the whole field between us. You take one side, I’ll cover the other. Then we’ll be good!’ I’m still in touch with that bloke.

  I hope that because I’m someone who is, to some degree, in the public eye, I can be an inspiration to others. I don’t hold myself out as any kind of shining light, far from it, but I support stroke-related research and raise money for it and stroke services, without making any kind of fanfare at all. I’m sure there are hundreds of people in the same boat. I just hope that if I talk to the people I meet about stroke and provide a little support, then because I have a bit of a profile, maybe people who didn’t know much about stroke might learn something.

  Previously I was one of those people who thought, ‘Stroke is something that happens to old people.’ I know for a fact that Isabella thought the same. Well, it’s not. Stroke doe
s not discriminate at all. Of course, if you’re unfit and you smoke and drink, then yes, you’re more likely to have one. But stroke can affect young kids too. It can even affect babies. It’s a much bigger issue in our society than most people realise. If I can make people more aware of it, that’s great.

  Recognising the symptoms is really important too. Recognising that ‘Let’s not mess around with this; let’s get to a doctor’ type of moment, even if it turns out to be a false alarm, can be vital to survival and recovery. It’s always better to be on the safe side, as I was—‘Yes, you’d better call an ambulance.’

  Meeting so many inspirational people at the Life After Stroke awards coincided with a conversation I had with James Gemmell, one of my colleagues at Sky. He had a family connection to stroke back in New Zealand and we were chatting while we were on air one Saturday. He said, ‘Look, I’m thinking of running the London Marathon this year and I’d like to do it for the Stroke Association. Would you like to help?’ I said, ‘You know what, I think I might just run the marathon with you.’ He said, ‘Really?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’

  Then we came up with the idea of having something specific to raise money for, albeit under the umbrella of the Stroke Foundation. From previous experience—when I raised money for an athletics track for Stoke Mandeville in 2000—I knew that it helped to have a tangible focus.

  Back then I’d said to Nigel Wray and Nick Leslau, ‘Come on, let’s run a marathon.’ Nigel had run marathons before. Even Nick—a big guy who never had—said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it too.’ The three of us raised £300,000, and a track was built for wheelchair- bound athletes. It was tangible. People could look at it and say, ‘That’s what my money went towards.’

  In this instance, if we were to say, ‘I’m raising money for the Stroke Association’, people who get hit on by charities all the time would think, ‘Oh, just another charity . . .’ So there had to be a special, meaningful, tangible goal to aim for so that people could say, ‘Okay, that’s where the money’s going.’ It’s all about goals. Small steps.

  And so that’s how the Back to Work project was born and launched. The Stroke Association found other sponsors who, between them, agreed to match whatever we raised—the Association needed £300,000 to get the project off the ground. Sky got involved too and we had a Team Sky who agreed to run the marathon and raise money with James and me. Of particular significance to me personally was that the marathon was almost a year to the day since my stroke.

  Why did I do it? I’ve often asked myself that. Part of it was my desire to continue to find a degree of physical closure for myself post-stroke, in combination with my inbuilt competitive nature. People said, ‘But you’ve recovered well.’ That was true. But I wanted a great recovery, and to run a marathon a year later qualified as great in my eyes.

  Not that I actually ran it all. I didn’t do a huge amount of running training; I did a lot of walking. My calves really blew up, probably while trying to protect my already bad knees, and so I said to myself, ‘In the worst-case scenario, I’ll walk the whole bloody thing!’ I just wanted to finish it. That was my goal. I didn’t want this ‘I’m going to do a sub-four or a sub-three and a half’ pressure. People would ask me what time I was aiming for and I’d tell them that my goal was to finish on the same day I started.

  I’d never walked a marathon before. The first one that I ran took me four and a half hours, so heaven knows how long it would take to walk one. I tried to calculate it walking round Richmond Park. I’d talk to myself, saying things like, ‘Well, if three laps equals X, it’ll take so many hours to do this . . .’ I worked out that it would take me seven and a half hours to walk the marathon course. I thought, ‘Well that’s not toooo bad. It’ll still be daylight . . .’

  When it came to it, I managed to run the first half before my calves completely gave in. I walked the last part, but I was in absolute agony. Interestingly, James Gemmell—who’s light, fit and does a lot of running—had all kinds of problems. He’d trained really hard, was really keen and was going for a specific time.

  But his calves blew out and I think his hamstring also went. Then he said, ‘I don’t think I can do it.’ I felt really sorry for him; he was really disappointed. So I said, ‘Mate . . . just walk with me. We’ll have a chat; we’ll get round.’ And that’s exactly what we did. We walked it and we were still passing people at the end—people who were trying to run! I think it took us five and a half hours. James was great, as were all the people from Team Sky. It was an uplifting day.

  We raised enough money to create the Back to Work project and make it an ongoing program for three years. Employees’ salaries would be guaranteed for that period by the money we raised. The program is designed to help people back into the community. People always assume that when someone leaves hospital they’re cured. Actually, that’s just the start. Leaving hospital merely means that you’ve survived, and it’s when you get home that the real issues start. That’s when people need answers to questions like, ‘What do I do? What am I capable of doing?’

  Lots of people can’t work as they used to after a stroke, so the Back to Work program aims to give people a reason to get out of bed in the morning—to do something, even if it isn’t what they did before. It’s really important to help people feel they are contributing, and to give them a sense of self-worth. It’s a big thing and I’m really passionate about it. When it came to getting me back to work, I’d been lucky. The companies I was working for, as well as Sky, were very supportive and gave me time. Also, I’d remained very capable. But that’s not always the case.

  I remember my first day back at Sky after the stroke. I was to comment on the Australia v Wales Test. Gus Williamson, the head of rugby at Sky, said, ‘You don’t have to rush back to do this.’ And I thought, ‘Well, I’ll be watching at home anyway.’ If I worked I’d be driven to the studio, I’d sit there with people I know, talking about something I know, then I’d be driven home. It would all be over in two and a half hours. I thought, ‘I can do that!’ So I did and Sky were great.

  They never put any pressure on me. It was more a case of my saying, ‘Right, I’m ready.’ There wasn’t much of a downside for me, and that first call after the stroke worked okay. It was a big step and I do admit that I was a little apprehensive. As I’ve said, the smaller the screen, the easier it is for me. Once you get these big, wide screens, like the ones at Sky, I can’t see the left-hand side of the screen.

  So sometimes I’d be watching the ball carrier and all of a sudden a tackler would appear from the left and I’d say, ‘God, where did he come from?’ Fitzy would say, ‘He was standing there, Michael!’ I’m used to it now, but initially it was quite a shock.

  By way of comparison, I heard one story about a young lady who was an accountant in a company. She had a stroke and the company was very supportive of her and said, ‘When you’re ready, back you come.’ But she couldn’t operate at the level she wanted to, or was used to. So, while the company was good to her, she said, ‘I can’t do this.’

  They ended up finding her a role as a front-desk greeter, more or less. While much less senior than her previous job, to her it was important that she got up in the morning, got dressed and went to work. She had a meaningful role that she enjoyed and fitted her altered capabilities at her company, and without that she wouldn’t have known what to do. That’s what Back to Work is all about.

  The program not only helps with jobs, CVs and training, it also helps with families. That’s part of the whole Stroke Association remit. It’s not just the survivors they help; it’s the people around them, who are often forgotten. I know that in my family Isabella has to do things—simple things—that I can’t. That’s really tough on her, and it’s tough on me too because I miss taking the kids to parties or sports at the weekend. But in some cases people need full-time carers, or have to adapt their housing situation because they can’t walk up stairs. It’s really stressful on everybody involved and often it’s the families who are
forgotten.

  TWENTY

  THE PUNDIT

  PEOPLE, INCLUDING EX-PLAYERS AND colleagues, often ask me, ‘How did you get into doing all the media stuff?’

  I certainly never set out to become a pundit. But I never did anything to burn that bridge while I was still playing either. When people asked me questions after games, or Sky or anyone else did special pieces with me for shows like The Rugby Club, because I had a wide range of interests outside rugby, my pieces tended to be interesting and a little insightful. An anecdote here, a funny quote there—something to show that I’d given the question a bit of thought rather than saying the first thing that came into my head.

  I didn’t do this because I wanted a job in broadcasting. I did it because that’s how I am. I’ve always tried to develop a broad palette of interests. I think that it dates back to the amateur days of rugby, when your closest teammates might be a lawyer, a farmer and a doctor. You can’t help but absorb some of that knowledge. I always encourage people to learn as much as possible about areas that aren’t part of their daily life. That’s also the advice I give young guys now when they say, ‘I want to get into broadcasting.’ It’s even more pertinent in the professional game to try to broaden your horizons because just about everyone a player interacts with is another rugby professional.

  I always think that when you get a chance to get in front of the camera or know you’re going to be interviewed after a game, you should do some preparation. That’s your shop window. Give it thought. Try and be entertaining. Don’t just roll out the clichés like ‘Hats off to the opposition’ or ‘It’s a game of two halves’, which everybody just tunes out. Say something interesting. You don’t have to be controversial. Just be analytically astute. Use words that other people don’t use. There’s no need to give away team secrets or criticise people. Just say something that people might not know.