Stroke - International Women's Day 2026

To women affected by stroke, by disability - even though we may not hear it in the conventional talks that might be happening around the country. This day includes you. Balance The Scales.

Approaching 33 years since my stroke this month, I can feel it in my bones, the preparation for survival ever after.

Each year is different, different memories from that time - this year I'm thinking about the images of the only two women I knew of in the public eye who I could connect with on a very quiet and personal level of internal strength and my intense desperation to be still included in life.

They were Helen Keller ( I learnt about Helen Keller in Primary School and I wondered what influences her life's work was having on the speech therapy being delivered to me like a blunt object to my forehead - this was after all 1993). and Patricia Neal (Stroke Survivor/Hollywood Actress/Mother/Grieving Mother/Roald Dahls Wife and ex wife)

Somewhere in medical records there is a huge amount of information about me or maybe those records have been shredded. I don't know. I'd like to know what blood results said about me, how those results were then told to people around me. I tried to be the human being in-between the delivery of test results and my next therapy of any sort.

I'M STILL HERE

I'm still here,

In between the bio markers, the sad looking cell under your microscope.

Between the padding of my body.

I'm a young woman of many layers, seasons, sunrises and sunsets

Underneath bleached starchy sheets pulled out from underneath me, drenched with sweat and urine. My body weeps.

The clean air I've breathed is in shock in this stifling scented house of sickness, I'm choking on sick air

Settling in my lungs.

Breathing, visualising little clusters of tree like structures in my lungs

I don't want to give them the medical name

I want to think of them as my internal forest, struggling to keep me alive.

My forest is thick and sticky with so many other substances,

Heated vibrations , that are on the verge of collapse

I'm so sorry my dear dear body for all the hurt.

Not just now it feels like, but for the eternity from before now.

I bargain - if I live, I promise not to complain - even when the roar of injustice fills my whole being with internal fire!!

I'll do as I'm told, like a compliant puppet on a string. That way, I fit into a box. I won't be sitting in front of of another person struggling to answer a banal question about my goals, that I don't have an answer to.

Hear a Doctor call me hysterical as I struggle to avoid any contact with the predator, the tensions between the puppet and the wind in my spirit, I'm breathless.

But those puppet strings, they became so tangled with the denial of my story, my survivor story. And I wait to be asked about what.....happened.......back.......then.......

And be given the space to weave my answer in a way that honours the moments when I closed my eyes and wondered if I would wake to see another day. When I wondered, if I died then I wouldn't have to see the sadness in others for who and what is before them now. I wouldn't need to know how I was to be forever after a burden on them, a burden in the community, a burden, a burden a burden.

I sit in front of another form and I choke with the internal bargaining I did back then and think how it was all for nothing......

If I say, it would it have been better to have died back then......then I deny my children born after my stroke their life.

This blog is about how denying to give someone effective ways to communicate after stroke, about how not connecting emotionally with their attempts of "I'm hereness" and not moving at a pace which is appropriate for them might impact on their future.

International Women's Day, my bit to balance the scales for women affected by stroke, I'm still here - see you next year :-) xx