I’m a teacher by profession. At the time of the stroke, I had been an Anglican religion teacher in a Flemish schools for over 25 years. It was a busy life, particularly since I taught in both primary and secondary schools. One year I worked in seven schools, a few hours at each, which of course caused a lot of stress, but I enjoyed my work. I spent a lot of time travelling between schools, and I had to keep records and sync all my different school timetables. Sometimes I literally went straight from a class of first years in primary school to a class of 18-year-olds in secondary school. I loved my job and always found it a very enjoyable challenge.
February 7, 2017: that day is etched in my memory. It was a Tuesday, and unexpectedly it turned out to be my very last working day. It has acquired a special place in my life, not because of anything I did that day, but because of the things I haven’t been able to do since.
From February 8th, I was at home with a thumping headache and tingling in my left arm. The doctors thought it was probably a trapped nerve, a remnant of an old back injury. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case. On March 13th I was sitting on the settee at home and suddenly I could no longer feel or move my left arm. I felt dreadful and I could no longer see things around me properly.
When I tried to get to the car to go to hospital, I couldn’t walk in a straight line, I kept turning left. I didn’t know it then, but my entire left side had been weakened. I was rushed to UZ Gasthuisberg, Leuven, and was soon told that I had had a stroke. A blood clot had lodged in one of the blood vessels that supplied my brain with oxygen. Part of my parietal lobe had died off, although they didn’t express it quite so bluntly at the time.
I was moved to a fifth-floor room in the stroke unit, and so began a years-long rehabilitation process that is still ongoing.