Having had a stroke myself, I was deeply moved by Jill Bolte Taylor’s account of hers in My Stroke of Insight. The book was lent to me by long time friend, Beth, who’d been through a harrowing tangle with a massive brain tumour a few years prior (we’re still wondering whether there might be a causal link between dramatic brain trauma, Umgazana coinage games and late night teenaged ‘dronk verdreit’).

What makes Jill Bolte Taylor’s experience so unique is the work she was doing: she studied the brain. A neuroanatomist at Harvard Medical School, she observed her neural networks collapse as a blown blood vessel caused brain functions to shut down one by one. The research she’d done allowed her to understand what was happening…

Her journey of healing is inspirational for anyone – for me, most especially. Simply knowing someone else had experienced something similar was deeply comforting when I was struggling with a sense of silent isolation: no one in the inner circle truly understood what had happened to me and how irrevocably different I now felt.

Anyway, today’s is a short post I’ll leave you in the capable hands of this amazing woman: