Once a survivor.   Now a warrior.

Americans love my Euro sounding accent. I am an anglophone who grew up in an English speaking neighborhood of Montreal and I have South African English parents. I have Foreign Accent Syndrome. I couldn’t speak after my massive stroke in 2008. Finally, around 2012, thanks to my speech therapy and the SpeakIt! iPhone app, my…

Stroke is the second most frequent cause of death after coronary artery disease, accounting for 6.4 million deaths across the world. One out of three people who have a stroke are under 65 years old. Babies. Teenagers. College kids. Singles. Moms and Dads of little ones. At any age stroke can occur. On December of…

My energy (Ki) flows down my motor system in my brain carried my nerves system into my shoulder, arm, wrist, hand and thumb & fingers’ muscles & ligaments. This happens to me over four years (& counting). I can see my energy like a waves pushing a little bit of tiny sands up onto a…

A Man stands in a boulder and scrub-grass strewn desert watching sheep. He is an unlikely shepherd; a tall, handsome Man of about thirty, obviously brought up in luxury and not used to this kind of life. The other shepherds his age, with their weather beaten faces and toothless grins, could easily pass for the…

Do you know what the hardest word to say for me is?   Silk.   First, my tongue draws back to the ‘Eeessss’ then, slides across the mouth and double loop-de-loop to say, ‘eeeee’. Then rounds it up around the palate and ‘laaaa’ and drop down to say, ‘ka’. Confusion reigns in my brain and…

Nearly 6 1/2 years ago, I was in a catastrophic massive stroke. Stuck in a medical coma, I didn’t know where I existed. Now, look: I am a Stroke Hero. I even know where my flight tickets, my core is handing my backpack & I’m fluent in non-verbal communications (traveling through Thailand you have to…

My superior longitudinal fasciculus in my left brain had this trouble: it couldn’t function because my blood clot exploded right in its face. Imagine this: a grenade going boom in a bunker. My superior longitudinal fasciculus was the superhighway of my working memories, my short term memories, my entire language system, my grammatical system, my…

I knew about aphasia after reading Oliver Sacks’ book, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. But, seriously, having aphasia is like playing a 1980 arcade game. Things became much more fun when I found a website that suggests video games for people with aphasia. Paste the link in your browser and enjoy!…

On December 8, 2008, I was unconscious.  I lay there in the ICU in a medical coma.  The brain surgeon was completely exhausted  He wept to my parents, “He had a fist-sized blood clot in his left hemisphere of his brain.  What we’re seeing is a catastrophic massive stroke”.   He was carefully pointing out that…

My tango teachers, Eric and Cassie, taught me to understand the subtle “sense” of kinesthesia. Kinesthesia is the sense that detects bodily position, weight, or movement of the muscles, tendons, and joints. This is what happens when my brain gets feedback about the way my body is moving and the way my dance partner’s body…