Alison Farquhar

I had my stroke 6 years ago at the age of 36 years. I was working as a GP in Swindon, I was married to Andrew, who was in the Army and we had three children, Timothy (5) and Iain and Douglas (twins of 4).

It was Monday 31st May, the Bank Holiday weekend, and I was the doctor on call for the practice area. I had worked for three days already and was expecting to hand over to another doctor in the practice. When I went to the surgery on the Monday morning, there was no one there. It had been a busy weekend, all due to one patient who became acutely psychotic and had been dancing naked on the Downs. It had taken nearly all my time to get her admitted to hospital as there was a bed shortage in the region. I was tired.

At 7 o'clock that evening, as my husband was putting the children to bed, I was relaxing with my feet up and I noticed that my vision appeared strangely pink. I felt "weird" but couldn't put into words exactly how. Words themselves were hard to find, so I had to really concentrate on what I was trying to say. I knew that I had to get upstairs to bed. As I was getting undressed I found that my feet were not really feeling the ground and that walking was difficult.

I knew that it was a stroke and asked my husband to get me an aspirin. The ambulance was called and I was taken to the local district hospital. The duty consultant was called in because I worked for him once a week as his clinical assistant in the diabetic clinic. The general consensus of opinion was that I was suffering a severe migraine, probably overreacting and that things would be alright in the morning. As we were both obviously worried, the doctors decided to keep me in over night.

In the morning, I was having difficulty forming words and felt oddly lop-sided. I kept walking into things and knocking stuff over. A decision was made to send me to Oxford to the nearest MRI scanner which showed what we suspected. I had had an embolism in the posterior cerebral artery, which is the main blood vessel to the brain where visual information is interpreted. It was small consolation that suddenly everyone seemed to be a lot more concerned!!

The care I received in hospital was exemplary. It is not always a good thing to be a doctor in your own hospital. Luckily, one friend realised that I would not want to be seen in old maternity nighties so she did a mercy dash to M&S for some of the rather more functional, but none the less dashing, lingerie. She also brought me some scented soaps and perfume. That was the greatest kindness and the thing most appreciated, I was still a woman and very unused to entertaining work colleagues in my night clothes!! I had so many visitors I was shattered.

When I was discharged four days later, I was not given any routine follow-up, but the consultant said that he would write to me once he had all my results. We were leaving the area in the next few weeks and I knew that I was at risk of a second more devastating CVA for several months. I also knew that I would have to stop "the Pill". What I did not know was whether I would be able to drive, whether I would be able to return to work. I also did not realise that I would not be able to read fluently as I could no longer scan along a line of words. I was told that I could expect to show any improvement over six months and any residual deficit after that was unlikely to recover.

The next six months in Germany were a nightmare. I had to walk everywhere but felt so tired I had to spend most of the afternoon sleeping. Andrew was away a lot training for and then on a six month tour of Northern Ireland. My children had been uprooted from England and transplanted in a garrison town in Germany. They had to start in a new and very different school and suddenly they had a father who never came home and a mother who slept all the time they were at home. Food suddenly became very baked bean orientated and they soon got sick of those!

After Andrew had been in Northern Ireland for a month I realised that I was pregnant. I felt sick, even more tired and I could no longer walk any distance as my pelvic ligaments were so soft walking was painful. I had to return to England to be close to my parents so that they could help me with parenting my children. The pregnancy was quite extraordinary, as I seemed to get through those 9 months functioning on two levels. On the first, I was insisting on amniocentesis as I was aware of the increased likelihood of a Downs Syndrome baby, but on the second, I was denying that it was happening to me.....I would wake up and it would all have been a bad dream.

Finally Melissa was born. I had a TIA following her delivery, but remarkably, it was at that point that I really began to recover. The whole family was fabulous and made sure that I was managing without mollycoddling me. I have made steady progress over the intervening six years. I slept a little bit less each day, concentrated a little bit more, gradually built up my reading speed (though I still can't scan, especially in columns eg the telephone directory and finding things on shelves in supermarkets is really difficult.....why do they always change them around?!). I am sure that the defect in my vision is improving slowly, though getting back my driving licence appears to be unlikely.

In order to improve my ability to concentrate and in an effort to retrain in a specialty where driving was not important, I went back to Nottingham University three years after the stroke to do a postgraduate degree in Sports Medicine. Melissa was too young to really notice that I wasn't around much, but I shall always be grateful to Andrew and the boys for enabling me to do this by being completely unselfish. I have been earning a small salary for the past 2 ¹/2 years and am aiming to get back into mainstream general practice in the next two or three years. In the meantime, I am practicing what I try to teach my patients and getting fit. I have always thought that the Great North Run sounded "fun" and as it is 25 years since my husband and I met in Berlin we celebrated by returning to a very different city and running the marathon two weeks later.....39.3 miles for Different Strokes.

Congratulations Alison - she completed the two runs-even finished with a sprint! She raised over £4000 in sponsorship money. Well done!

Thanks to Alison for sending in her profile. Anyone else who would like to share their story can send it along with a photograph (if you're not shy!)

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