Depending on the severity, having a stroke can be extremely serious, leaving a person without the ability to talk or walk, and that is if they survive. These 5 celebrities have all had strokes and say they were lucky to live through their experience. Some believe they were close to death, while others only had minor strokes but it still opened their eyes to their own health.
Frankie has had two strokes over the course of one year. He explained how the first one felt: “I couldn’t say words. I thought I was saying them! My fiancee was looking at me like I was speaking a foreign language. I’m still trying to make sense of it, but happy I’m alive.”
Jessie revealed that she had a small stroke aged just 18. She said she “had just had a minor stroke. I thought that I was never going to get better. I feel so lucky that I was given a second chance at life, so every day when I am able to do this, you have no idea how amazing it feels that I’m so lucky to be onstage and singing and living my dream… I appreciate every day that I am able to live my dream.”
Kirk Douglas
Kirk says going through a stroke changed him: “It affected my speech. I couldn’t talk. Now talking is something we take for granted. We think of something and we say it. We are not concerned with all the mechanisms that are involved in speaking, we don’t appreciate it. Like so many things in life, we don’t appreciate what we have. My first reaction to my stroke was to say nothing. It was too much effort to construct the words, the muscles in my tongue, my teeth, I couldn’t coordinate them properly to say a word. It was easier just to say nothing. But to say nothing is to withdraw from life. I was not ready for that. So, like a child I learned to speak again. It is still difficult and I still have many moments when I want to give up, but I fight against it. The most important thing is that I find that my stroke has made me a better person. I don’t take so many things for granted. I appreciate more and that leads me to care more about others.”
Samantha Morton
Samantha credits her close friend Jason Pierce with helping her through her stroke: “Jason and I have been mirroring each other. He was really sick and then I had a stroke at the beginning of (that) year. “He was the only person I knew who understood what that was like, being near to death. He’s just an incredible person. He’s very courageous, and he helped me get through it all.”
Sharon had a stroke in 2001 which left her brain bleeding for 11 days: ”My head blew up. It was almost as if I was shot. I had two unbelievably painful shots in the left side of my head that physically knocked me over on to the couch. I called Phil and said, ‘I think I’ve had a stroke.’ I was haemorrhaging into my brain for 11 days before they found out what was going on. Yes, I had a ‘white light’ experience. It was a very beautiful and illuminating experience. It was a very profound thing to come back.”
