From Stroke in Pregnancy to Deep Healing: Emily’s Story of Spiritual and Physical Recovery

Stroke in Pregnancy: How Emily Rebuilt Her Life 17 Years Later

When Emily Sarah Gable had a stroke at 26, she was pregnant with her second child. She was also in the thick of early motherhood, navigating life with a 15-month-old at home. What should’ve been a time of joyful anticipation turned into a medical and emotional crisis she never saw coming.

Her stroke was an ischemic clot to the cerebellum, causing vertigo, vomiting, loss of balance, facial paralysis, and sensory changes across her body. At the time, no one knew how to respond to a stroke in pregnancy. She was shuffled between hospital departments. Misdiagnosed. Even told she might lose the baby.

But she didn’t. And 17 years later, she’s here to share what happened next.

🎧 Why This Story Matters

I first spoke with Emily back in Episode 65. Now, more than 350 episodes in, she returns to reflect on the journey most people don’t talk about: the long arc of healing after the immediate danger is gone.

Emily doesn’t just speak to what happened to her. She speaks to what happened within her.

This episode is about more than just recovery; it’s about rediscovery. It’s about becoming. And it’s a powerful reminder that even when it feels like everything is falling apart, something deeper might be falling into place.

🧠 Stroke in Pregnancy: A Rare but Life-Altering Event

Most people don’t realize strokes can happen in pregnancy. Even fewer know what it’s like to live through one.

Emily was misdiagnosed with preeclampsia. Interns told her the baby wouldn’t make it. She was put through magnesium treatments unnecessarily. Her care was inconsistent, and her body didn’t feel like her own anymore.

She couldn’t swallow. Couldn’t walk. Couldn’t feel temperature on half her body. Yet, somehow, she gave birth naturally at 37 weeks. Her son arrived healthy. And only then did the healing truly begin.

💫 The Path to Healing: Slow, Nonlinear, and Deeply Transformative

Emily’s story reminds us that recovery is never just physical. It’s emotional. It’s spiritual. It’s personal.

She found her way back through movement. Through fascia-based healing. Through Iyengar yoga. Through touch, breath, and learning how to feel her body again.

Eventually, she became a certified massage therapist, yoga and Pilates teacher, and bodyworker, all because she wanted to share the healing that helped her feel alive again.

💬 “I Had to Relearn How to Be in My Body”

One of the most powerful moments in our conversation was when Emily shared what it felt like to sit on a soft ball in yoga class — and fall off. Over and over.

But she kept going.

That ball became a metaphor for her recovery. For rebalancing. For trusting her body again.

And maybe that’s the most powerful part of her story: she didn’t just recover. She transformed.

💡 What You’ll Take Away from This Episode

• Hope — that healing is still possible, even if it’s been years since your stroke
• Insight — into what it’s like to have a stroke in pregnancy and recover while parenting
• Strength — to advocate for yourself when medical systems fall short
• Compassion — for your younger self, your body, and the people around you
• Perspective — that even after trauma, it’s possible to build a life with meaning, purpose, and connection

🧭 For Stroke Survivors and Caregivers Alike

Whether you’re a stroke survivor, a caregiver, or someone supporting a loved one, this episode is an invitation to slow down and breathe to reflect, reconnect, and imagine what recovery could look like.

Recovery isn’t linear. It isn’t fast. But with the right support, the right people, and the right perspective it can be powerful.

Finding Strength After a Stroke in Pregnancy: Emily’s 17-Year Healing Journey

Emily had a stroke while pregnant at 26. 17 years later, she opens up about healing, motherhood, and how she found strength after the chaos.

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Highlights:

00:00 The Initial Symptoms
07:07 Stroke In Pregnancy and Misdiagnosis
13:54 Birth Experience and Early Recovery
20:23 Journey to Healing and Self-Discovery
26:41 Personal Growth and Relationship Changes
33:35 Perspective on Breath and Healing
40:07 Emily’s Reflections on Life Post-Stroke
52:59 Health Journey and Blood Pressure Issues
59:01 Emily’s Experience with Beta Blockers and Stroke
1:05:52 Lyme Disease Diagnosis and Treatment
1:18:07 The Importance of Self-Compassion and Support
1:24:35 The Role of Community and Support in Recovery
1:36:55 Therapy and Rehabilitation in Recovery
1:43:04 The Importance of Self-Care and Mindfulness
1:49:44 Technology and Tools in Recovery

Transcript:

Introduction And Initial Symptoms

Bill Gasiamis 0:00
Before we dive in a quick thank you to Banksia Tech for supporting this episode, proud distributors of the Hanson rehab glove by Syrebo, which is what I’m wearing right now. It’s designed to help improve hand movement and function at home, whether you’re early in recovery or years down the line, you’ll hear more about it later in the episode.

Bill Gasiamis 0:25
Links are in the YouTube description and in the show notes at recoveryafterstroke.com. Today’s story is a rare one, but also one that more people are starting to search for. What happens when you have a stroke in pregnancy. Emily Sarah Gable was 26 pregnant with her second child and still caring for a toddler, when a blood clot hit her cerebellum.

Bill Gasiamis 0:50
What followed was vertigo, vomiting, facial paralysis, sensory loss and the terrifying uncertainty of whether her baby or she would make it through. She was misdiagnosed, sent through maternity, cardiac and stroke care with no clear plan. She couldn’t swallow, couldn’t walk, and yet, somehow, she gave birth safely, and then began a 17 year journey of rebuilding from the inside out.

Bill Gasiamis 1:16
This episode is about more than survival. It’s about what comes after. It’s about how trauma can transform and how healing doesn’t end after the hospital discharge. If you’re navigating stroke recovery while parenting, if you have ever felt unseen, or if you’re years out and still searching for meaning, Emily’s story is a powerful reminder that it’s never too late to grow. Let’s get into it. Emily Sarah Gable, welcome to the podcast.

Emily Gable 1:46
Thank you.

Bill Gasiamis 1:49
Welcome back, actually, last time we chatted was around six years ago, Episode 65 we are beyond 350. Episodes right now.

Emily Gable 2:01
Wow, that’s amazing. Thank you.

Bill Gasiamis 2:04
That’s a lot of stroke stories. And I remember at the beginning, I had to reach out, finding the stroke survivors, dragging them over the line to get them onto a podcast, because of all the challenges that stroke causes, and the podcast was fairly new. Stroke Recovery type podcasts were fairly new back then and I never expected to get to 350 episodes.

Bill Gasiamis 2:34
And what I never thought about was getting somebody back after six years to talk about the journey beyond that first part of the story you know, and to recap your story a little, maybe I’ll ask you, rather than sort of tell the audience what I think it was about, tell us a little bit about what stroke, what life was like before stroke at the very beginning, and then when the stroke happened, and then what life was like after the stroke happened, because it was a very complicated time in your life. Not only did you have a stroke, there was a whole bunch of other stuff going.

Emily Gable 3:18
Well, I don’t actually quite remember my life before stroke. It’s really hard for me to recall, except that I know that I was frustrated and unhappy in my life, and I would not have admitted that at the time, but looking back at it, I definitely was and I had a let’s see. When I had my stroke, my daughter was 15 months old, and I’d had a really beautiful home birth with her, no complications.

Emily Gable 3:57
And then my grandfather passed away. We went to the funeral in the beginning of May. This was 2008 and on the trip home, it was a plane ride and a two hour car ride to get home. I had really intense vertigo in the airport, to the point where I couldn’t move and thought I was going to be sick. And I was like, and I’d had vertigo before, but that was different that time.

Emily Gable 4:31
And I was like, No, and I and I had midwives, I brought it up to them, and they’re like, well, you have more blood in your body because you’re pregnant, I don’t know if I said that I was pregnant again. So I was due in September. My daughter would have been, like, 20 months old when new baby was born, and then two weeks after we got back, I was in the shower I started spinning, the vertigo feeling for some reason, I grabbed all my clothes, ran to the bed, started vomiting into this pile of dirty clothes.

Emily Gable 5:15
And that was a stroke, I had a blood clot in my cerebellum. I had an ischemic stroke just to the right of center in my cerebellum, so it affected my primary functions of swallowing, urinating. I had the right side of my face affected and the left side of my body, so my right eye has some deficiencies. I can’t tear. I couldn’t, I couldn’t. I didn’t know all the scope of what was going on at the time, but it turned out, in the end, couldn’t tear.

Emily Gable 5:55
I can’t wear contacts anymore. I used to wear contacts, but I’m totally over that one, because I can’t feel the surface of my eyeball. So if there were to be anything under the contact to scratch my eye, because I don’t tear, I wouldn’t feel it. So they were like, just don’t wear contacts again, please, for your own eye health, and I had to relearn how to walk, because I had no sensation of pain or discomfort on my left side.

Emily Gable 6:29
So it was like this different kind of sensory experience walking. I also couldn’t feel I can’t feel temperature and like, wet and cold, which actually is a temperature thing. So when you like, put your hand in the dryer to see if your clothes are still damp, I don’t know, with my left hand, everything feels the same to me. So I have to use my right hand. And even then I’m like, help me out here, I like, just put it in longer or, I just guess, and take out wet clothes.

Stroke In Pregnancy and Misdiagnosis

Emily Gable 7:07
So my experience in the hospital was two weeks in the hospital and two weeks in a rehab hospital. I was pregnant with the stroke. So they’d had no idea where to put me. They put me in the maternity unit. They put me in the cardiac unit. They put me in the I went back to the labor and delivery. I went back to the I think I went back to like they didn’t have a stroke floor.

Emily Gable 7:40
So I underwent a lot of abuse from the medical system at a lot of inappropriate comments from doctors and interns. I was misdiagnosed with preeclampsia by an intern. Given I talked about this in that episode, I was given a day’s worth of magnesium infusion and told I was going to have a C section and a premature baby who probably wouldn’t live. None of it happened. I didn’t have preeclampsia, so I had to kind of process all of that BS while I was like, what’s happening inside of my body, or I didn’t process it.

Emily Gable 8:24
I don’t know if I talked about this, but I also my father was a raging alcoholic, and he came into the hospital. I remember the night that I had the magnesium treatment, and he came in after visiting hours drunk and, like, held my hand. He’s like, It should be me in here, it should be me. And I was like, What the hell come on, dude. So that was another layer on top of that, where I have this, like, really irresponsible, belligerent father, and I thought I was a healthy person here, like completely debilitated and hospitalized. You know, you go through the why? Me? It’s not fair stuff, and that was part of it.

Bill Gasiamis 9:11
Fair enough, going through all of that stuff, and you’re pregnant at the same time, and you have a stroke, and your regular life continues, and you can’t get a pause on your regular life just so you can deal with a stroke. I mean, it’s too much for anyone to, yeah, for sure, and it feels like it’s, you know, death by 1000 cuts.

Bill Gasiamis 9:36
You know, you don’t realize you’re in that situation until you’re in that situation, and then it’s too much, and then it just becomes overwhelming, because it’s so many things that were just I was unhappy. I had a baby at home. I had another baby on the way. I had a dysfunctional relationship with my father.

Bill Gasiamis 10:01
I had terrible treatment by the medical professionals, and all at a time where all you need is support, encouragement. You don’t need any of the other drama. You need somebody to help you make sure your baby’s healthy, the other one at home is okay, and the delivery goes okay, and then you’re okay, your health and well being is going to be okay in your and it’s just too much to handle.

Bill Gasiamis 10:30
And you know, I always reflect on the the part of stroke that we actually don’t have the skills and are not equipped to deal with things like that, the first time that happened to us, because we’ve maybe got away scot free for the majority of our lives, up until that moment, and then all of a sudden, you know, the will, the walls start closing in, and it’s no, no, I can’t have all this other rubbish happen. I just need to deal with this one thing.

Bill Gasiamis 11:03
But you had no choice yet to deal with the stroke and the birth of your baby and your and your other daughter and your daughter who was 20 months old, yeah, and how old are you if you’re working on improving hand function during your stroke recovery. There’s a tool that might help the Hanson glove by Syrebo, which is what I’m wearing right now, available from Banksia Tech.

Bill Gasiamis 11:31
It’s designed for Safe at Home Use whether you’re just starting rehab or years down the track. The glove features six therapy modes, including stretching, grasping, release and a mirror glove function that lets your stronger hand guide your affected one. It’s also available as a low cost assistive technology through various funding streams.

Bill Gasiamis 11:54
To learn more, visit Banksiatech.com.au, or check out the YouTube description and show notes at recoveryafterstroke.com. Now let’s take a moment. You’ve just heard Emily describe the instant everything changed. One minute she was in the shower. The next, her world was spinning. Her body was failing, and she was alone with a toddler, pregnant and terrified.

Bill Gasiamis 12:18
If you’ve ever had that moment where your body suddenly stopped working, where fear crept in faster than answers. You’re not broken. You’re in the middle of a storm, and like Emily, you’re not the same person who walked into that moment. You’re someone who is learning how to rise again, not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually too. Let’s get back to Emily as she begins to reclaim her strength, her sense of self and what healing really means 17 years later.

Bill Gasiamis 12:48
I was 20, I had my 27th birthday. 26th birthday in the hospital. Yeah, I was young,

Bill Gasiamis 12:55
And pardon my French, but at that stage, we pretty dumb as, yeah, for sure, as as adults anyway, because yeah, barely out of your teenage years, and you’re, and I’m, when I say your I’m talking about me, and yeah, your father, everybody, yeah, you’re a parent, you’re doing all these things, you’re taking all this responsibility. And I feel like there isn’t a smooth transition into adulthood.

Birth Experience and Early Stroke in Pregnancy Recovery

Bill Gasiamis 13:23
All of a sudden you become 18, you’re an adult according to the law, and perhaps because of circumstances your life. Some people would have had to grow up a lot earlier because of their circumstances at home, etc. But for me, I was so naive, so silly, so dumb at that age where I was just winging it, just trying to find a way to get through and it and that I remember that being probably one of the most stressful times in my life, this pretending that I was better or more capable or more knowledgeable than I was at 25.

Bill Gasiamis 14:01
And then feeling like I don’t have anyone else to go to for wisdom, even though my parents were really cool, they just didn’t have, they didn’t have Melbourne, you know, 1996 wisdom that I needed. They came from Greece, in another era, you know, for you know, from parents who went through World Wars and you know that they didn’t understand the the troubles and the challenges that we faced, you know, back then and even today, you know, they had a different mindset, a different idea of what it meant to endure challenges and problems and problems and all that kind of stuff.

Bill Gasiamis 14:43
So I can’t imagine what it was like to be in your shoes. What’s cool about it is, even through all of that stuff that you were going on, that you were going through at that moment, you found a way through. You still found a way through. So this is what I love about sharing these stories, is that what hopefully we’re going to do is paint a picture to people who are listening, who are early on, the walls are closing in around you, and you want hope that there is a way through. There is going to be an opening somewhere, right? So how did, how did the birth actually go? After all of the drama, how did the birth go?

Bill Gasiamis 15:26
So I ended up back in the hospital. I had another intense spell of vertigo. They put me on blood thinners, which nowadays are inexpensive, the ones that they had prescribed, but they had just come on the market, so it was like 3000 US dollars a month to be on these injectable Lovenox, which I think now is probably free, but at the time it was cutting edge.

Emily Gable 15:52
Was like a low molecular weight won’t affect the baby, blood thinner because and stable. The other one that they put me on afterwards was Coumadin, which is less stable, so they wanted to make sure that my whatever, the blood thinners were working. So they basically, when I went back into the hospital, they said you need to be on bed rest.

Emily Gable 16:15
And I was 36 weeks pregnant, and this is so fresh in my mind, because I just told someone the story earlier today, who asked me, I was 36 weeks pregnant. I went they said, you could be on bed rest, you could go home, but you absolutely cannot do anything except like, Get up and go to the bathroom. And I was like, like, you know, if you went and stayed in the hospital, you know, there’s better chance that you’ll be, you know, we’d like to, we’d like to monitor you.

Emily Gable 16:47
And I was like, that sounds like a better idea, because I have, you know, a child and a dog at home, and I know that I won’t be able to sit still. So I checked back in the hospital, waited for a week, and then they induced me. And my husband had given me a bunch of acupressure to induce labor, and he had started that. But the wasn’t it wasn’t happening fast enough for the doctors.

Emily Gable 17:15
You know, they got a schedule, they got it, they got to open the bed so they gave me misoprostol, which dilates the cervix, which is actually something I think they use in aborting a pregnancy. But they were, you know, like, evacuate the baby, it’s time, you know, he’s cooked enough. They waited till I was 37 weeks. Ideally, it would have been 38 but they were like, we need the bed.

Emily Gable 17:39
So 37 weeks I delivered him vaginally. I had had an experience of the home birth with no drugs or anything like totally natural. And this one was with Pitocin. I had a bag of Pitocin, which is like, I don’t know what they think it does, but it made a hell, because usually when you have contractions, it’s like this slow wave building up and it peaks and then slowly goes down.

Emily Gable 18:13
And with Pitocin, it’s like, peak done, peak done. There’s no gradual anything so that I did not like but I was in labor for 23 hours, and I’d been in labor for 23 hours with my previous child, so it wasn’t like shocked about that, and he came out real quick when I was ready to push. He came right out because he was tiny and he was healthy, and that’s when I was able to start healing from the stroke.

Emily Gable 18:45
Because I’d my body was growing a child, so it wasn’t able to be like, what does she need? You know, brain what is, what is your nervous system need? So after I gave birth, I started having, like, a increase in symptoms, like more spells of vertigo, more feelings of like extreme temperature changes.

Emily Gable 19:14
I don’t feel any of that anymore, but it was a little scary at first, but it was my body responding, like trying to, I this is what, I think it was all the neural pathways re Rerouting. It was like, Where, where is it blocked? Where can we go? I had gotten my feeding to add a feeding tube, and they had taken it out the end of July.

Emily Gable 19:41
So I had it from May 23 until the end of July, and I had already been swallowing for like, three weeks before it got taken outside, three weeks where I had this tube coming out of my stomach that was filling with the food that I’d been swallowing. It was really gross. Um. Yeah, so it, it’s, I feel like I’m still very much in the thick of the energetic healing from that, from my solar plexus having a hole punched in it.

Journey to Healing and Self-Discovery

Bill Gasiamis 20:15
I can relate to that. Because, you know, people ask me about the podcast. You know, your 350 episodes, they get excited. Wow, whatever. I’m not done talking about this thing. Like, yeah, I know that I’m inviting other people to share their story, but part of the reason for that is because I need to have the conversation. And I just stopped talking about it.

Bill Gasiamis 20:39
My whole entire life revolves around what happened to me, and not that it stops me from getting through life or achieving what I need to achieve in life. But it’s all consuming. It never goes away. I never forget what it was like. I never wake up in the morning and the symptoms and the deficits are not there, like everything is linked and connected so and for me, it’s been since 2012 I’ve been going through this, the first bleed when, what year was that, when the baby was born and you had the Stroke? 2008.

Emily Gable 21:21
And my niece was born May 17, and I had the stroke may 23 so there was, like a newborn in my family, and it was like a celebration. And then, you know, I have this events, and I like feel terrible, because I want that attention to be for this new life in our family.

Bill Gasiamis 21:51
You become the center of attention. And kind of makes sense. It’s been a sweet moment with a new birth, and then we’ve got to deal with illness and other parts of life that’s unexpected, right? So, yeah, people pause the excitement, perhaps, of having that new life into the world. And they’re all focused on you, which, you know, it’s logical, completely, totally logical makes sense. But I see what you’re saying. You’re kind of feeling like you stole the thunder a little bit.

Emily Gable 22:31
Yeah, and that wasn’t, obviously, I would rather have not had a stroke. That would have been nice. But, you know, also, at this point in my life, I’m like, I wouldn’t, I don’t wish any of it didn’t happen. I am exactly where I need to be right now, because that happens.

Bill Gasiamis 22:47
That’s an interesting comment, because people listen now again. And I wrote a book that is titled The unexpected way that a stroke became the best thing that happened. But people going through stroke now would and very understandably go, What are you talking about? How is that possible? And I don’t feel that right now, and I never felt that at the beginning either.

Bill Gasiamis 23:12
I didn’t feel that for the first three years or four years when I’m bleeding, yeah, and need brain surgery. Need to learn how to walk again and wake up with deficits. There’s no way I felt that. But why did you say that you wouldn’t change anything? What? What have been? It sounds like there’s been learnings, um, lessons and growth. Tell me about it.

Emily Gable 23:38
Yeah. So excuse me, I, you know, I had to relearn how to be in my body again. I had no idea what, where I was like. How did like? I was mad at my body. How could you have deceived me? How could you have done this to me? I thought that I was in control, like my brain, my soul, whatever. I thought that I had control of this stuff. You know, I eat well, exercise like, what did I do? Why did this happen?

Emily Gable 24:09
And then so I lost trust. I had to rebuild trust. I had to rebuild physical functions again. So I went to a geriatric yoga class, and I because I was like, okay, like, maybe I can keep up with the, you know, the pace of that. So I went, and it was, like, packed. I put myself in the back of the room, against the wall. I tried to do some balancing stuff, holding, like, against the wall.

Emily Gable 24:38
And I was like, yeah, there’s something to this for me right now. I need this kind of thing, but I don’t want to be in a class with 30 people. I want to be one on one with somebody. So I the town I lived in, I sought out a yoga teacher that was highly recommended, who did iyengar yoga, and I made an appointment talk to her about my. Situation, went to her and she goes, sit on this ball.

Emily Gable 25:03
And I was like, what? And she’s like, I want you to sit on this ball. And it was this, like, it’s like the size of a soccer ball that was inflated, and it was like, kind of soft, kind of squishy, filled with air. I couldn’t sit on. It took me a month, once a week of going to her to be able to sit on it and not fly off immediately, because I was in constant state of vertigo for until December.

Emily Gable 25:26
So my stroke was in May. December is when it finally my neural pathways figured out something else and I wasn’t in constant vertigo. So it was really challenging for me to do that, and then slowly, I started to move on top of the ball and feel things like what is happening with my body on this round object. And I learned how to feel my body in a way that I’d never knew possible.

Emily Gable 25:59
And I don’t know what I felt before the stroke. Honestly, in my body, I wasn’t paying that much attention to it. I just did things, you know, you kind of take it for granted, like, yeah, I can walk what? What’s the big deal? And then you can’t. And then you go, how do I do that? So this was actually a practice called Yamana body rolling. And I worked with this woman for four years, the my teacher in Maine.

Personal Growth and Relationship Changes After Stroke in Pregnancy

Emily Gable 26:31
Her name was Mariana, and I ended up training to become a teacher in this technique, because I felt like it had impacted me in such a positive way, I wanted to learn how to teach it and share it with as many people as possible. So, you know, if I hadn’t had that stroke, I wouldn’t have found that.

Emily Gable 26:54
So I found that, and then with that came many different modalities, footwork, working with people on a table, working on the face, TMJ issues, all the joints and that and I have broken bones from when I was early my 20s were, excuse my language. Can I curse? Yeah, a shit show, a shit show for my body. Like, I broke bones. I had a stroke, like, just I got it all over with my 20s.

Emily Gable 27:25
I have metal in my arm. I had pins and screws and metal in my ankle. So I had past injuries that I was like, Oh my gosh, this is helping that. So we moved to Mexico. I did a lot of hands on stuff with people there. Open my own studio because it was very inexpensive. So I was able to kind of practice on people there. They’re not litigious, like they are in the US.

Emily Gable 27:53
So I was able to, like, put my hands on people, and they weren’t like, Why are you touching me? They were like, everyone was like, great, this is awesome. So then we moved back to the US, I realized that I needed to be, like, official, to put my hands on people. So I went to massage school and discovered that I I love being a massage therapist. Like, that’s my that’s my jam, like, in addition to the other things.

Emily Gable 28:23
So I got my massage license. I’ve been licensed for seven years, and then I keep learning. I got my Pilates teacher certification, and now I’m working with this group called the human garage. They have a huge social media presence, and they do something called facial maneuvers, and it’s a way for people to learn how to release the fascia, the tension in their bodies themselves.

Emily Gable 28:49
So everything I’ve learned is kind of about empowering the individual to heal themselves, and it all started with my own healing journey after the stroke. So if I hadn’t had the stroke, I don’t know that this would have happened.

Bill Gasiamis 29:05
I say something similar to you in that, you know, podcast, I wrote a book speaking all that stuff, all because of the stroke. It definitely is, and it’s like a sliding doors moment. And I haven’t been able to reconcile this with myself yet either. If I hadn’t had the stroke, I don’t know whether I would have been wise enough to do the amazing things that I’ve done.

Bill Gasiamis 29:38
I think I would have continued down the same old, challenging, difficult, frustrated, annoyed, upset, angry path that I was on, angry at everybody, everyone else was the problem, you know, yelling at the kids for nothing, for being, you know, teenagers. Is probably not the best, you know, my wife might not, she might not agree in that she probably wouldn’t reveal.

Bill Gasiamis 30:12
But not the best, supportive, most amazing husband ever, you know, probably a little bit cranky and idiotic every so often. And it’s like, did really have, did I really have to go through this to grow up, grow a brain, become wiser, do things for other people, find my meaning and my purpose, really? I was I that stupid that I wouldn’t have done that beforehand, and unfortunately, I think the answer is yes.

Bill Gasiamis 30:46
That I don’t think I would have gone down this other path. I think I just would have continued trying to hurt all through space, get to the other end of it, be happy, but having done nothing to actually influence my happiness in the positive way. I didn’t think I would have done anything and just sort of got, got there and gone. What this is it?

Emily Gable 31:11
Yeah, there’s also some things that I feel like I experienced having a stroke that in our culture of, I mean, my, my, my Instagram algorithm shows me all sorts of like people who do psychedelic drugs in lots of Pilates And like things, body work stuff, and then mind, mind mind altering stuff. But I’ve never been drawn to do the mind altering stuff, because I feel like I was tripping the whole time I had a stroke. I don’t know what that feels like with the drugs, but I’m like there was some alternate reality happening for me there.

Bill Gasiamis 32:01
Feels very similar. So when I was tripping on a stroke brain, after the strokes, after the bleeds and all that kind of stuff, and then since then, when I have had an experience with mushrooms or two, it is very similar. And the only difference is, I have been able to while on a mushroom trip, is you seem to have some sort of conscious awareness if you’re the right kind of person, because some people don’t do psychedelics.

Bill Gasiamis 32:34
Well, if you’re the right kind of person, and you go into it with the right mindset, you have some kind of awareness that you’re willingly in the situation that you find yourself in, that it has a short time frame, that it’ll end, and when you get out of it, you’ll be back to quote, “normal” Was not what I felt when I was tripping. Stroke, yeah, tripping because of the stroke.

Bill Gasiamis 33:02
Did not feel that at all. I didn’t know why it was happening, how was happening, why I found myself there. Is it going to end? Am I going to get better? What if it stays like this? You know, I couldn’t, I couldn’t answer any of those questions. And that was scary, yeah, that was the difference. That was scary. This was not and, yeah, and, and I think that’s what.

Perspective on Breath and Healing

Bill Gasiamis 33:28
And being able to go to somewhere alternate, an alternate reality, for a short amount of time willingly is similar to what a ultra marathon runner will do, who decides I’m going to wake up in the morning and run and do 1000 kilometers, miles, kilometers, whatever, for the next five days and sleep two hours a day for the whole time. It’s, it’s like a it’s, you’ve, signed up for it’s very different, but we didn’t sign up for stroke.

Emily Gable 34:05
Exactly, that’s I fully agree with that, that it, I didn’t realize that, until recently, that this was a similar kind of thing as these, as psychedelics. I had a friend explaining her experience to me with, I don’t remember what drug it was, some, you know, a mind altering substance. And she started to talk about it, and I had to stop.

Emily Gable 34:32
And I was like, I was crying. And I was like, honestly, this sounds like when I have my stroke, except that you knew that it was going to end, and I did not know what the hell was going on and when it was going to end. And I couldn’t listen to this like, because there wasn’t the ability to control anything, and I didn’t have the consciousness of like, this will be over at some point. I was just like, What is going on?

Emily Gable 34:58
And all I could do was breathe, and, you know, yeah, I was throwing up, just like the people on ayahuasca, but I was throwing up and I didn’t know if that was ever going to stop. And when you’re when people do that stuff, they’re like, Oh, it’ll be however many hours, or whatever it is, yeah.

Emily Gable 35:16
So I feel like I had my own. I didn’t, I didn’t identify this until, like, maybe a year ago, I had my own near death experience, and gave me a lot of insight that I didn’t realize everyone doesn’t not have. And, yeah, that was that, when I had that realization, I was like, Oh, my goodness, oh, my god. I can’t believe that this is my perspective now.

Emily Gable 35:48
And I didn’t even realize I’ve been walking around for 16 years, not realizing that that was a huge, kind of like a huge, life altering journey, to put it in their words, of those people, the of the of that experience. But it was, it was the stroke that that did that, and I, I think the way I got through it was the support I had around me, you know, my husband, the people I didn’t know that were in my community that came and stepped up and brought food to everybody.

Emily Gable 36:30
I couldn’t swallow, so they brought food for him and my daughter. You know, my family, despite, you know, despite my dad, everyone else was really supportive, yeah. And so one thing I wanted to say is that it empowered me. It took me a long time, but it empowered me to find my voice.

Emily Gable 36:53
So one of the things that happened when I had the stroke was I really like my voice weakened because I wasn’t able to swallow, and I think it affected the muscles in general in my throat, so my voice got really weak. There was that physical but the energetic of like, what is it that I need? What is it that I want? What are the things that work for me in life?

Emily Gable 37:19
And when COVID happened in 2020 and I think we talked in 2019 so when COVID happened in 2020 it was, it was a intense, I think everyone went inward quite a bit, it seems. And afterwards I got a divorce, and I am very amicably, split up with my we were married for 17 years. We’re really good friends. We live a mile apart. We co parent our kids.

Emily Gable 37:49
My daughter just graduated high school, and we’re friends with each other’s partners currently. And I just needed to be like that. You know, we trauma bonded big time over the stroke, and that was very toxic, and we both recognized that there were lots of things, but that was like, what kind of held us together? Was this shared memory.

Emily Gable 38:16
And one thing I don’t know if I ever mentioned, was that we got together, and I got pregnant after we’ve been together for a month. So I didn’t even know this guy for two years. When I had my stroke, it hadn’t even been two years that I knew him and I had a baby and a stroke.

Bill Gasiamis 38:36
He hit the jackpot.

Emily Gable 38:40
And then he’s there, like, taking care of all of us. Because he should have just run away, you know, everyone was like, Dude, he’s awesome. He stayed around, but, you know, he stayed around. So I was like, wow, this is this guy’s awesome, you know.

Bill Gasiamis 38:54
And he was awesome. And he is awesome, but the thing about it is, if he’s at the same age as you.

Emily Gable 39:01
He was younger, he was 23

Bill Gasiamis 39:05
Well, if he’s 23 he’s just as dumb as, yeah, you and I were at the same age, because I was a dad at 22 just a month after My 22nd birthday. And then I’m thinking, you know he now, he was a teenager five years ago. He was in school five years ago. Right now, he’s a parent of a child with a woman he’s met a month ago and now is dealing with a stroke survivor.

Bill Gasiamis 39:40
But who has time for all of that stuff at 23 no one knows what the hell they’re doing at 23 let alone how to manage all of that stuff. Now, I did the same thing that he did. I stuck around when I got my girlfriend back, my girlfriend back then pregnant, we became married, and we’re still together.

Emily’s Reflections on Life Post-Stroke in Pregnancy

Bill Gasiamis 40:00
And for me, it was there was no second thought. But what it did do is it put my growth, my life, my learning, my shifting from one phase to the next on hold. That’s what it did. So when I got to 37 if it wasn’t for the stroke i That’s why I don’t think I would have woken up. I would have just continued going, Oh my God.

Bill Gasiamis 40:30
Because after my son was born in 96 our second son was born in 2000 so I’m just going hammer and tongs work as many jobs as I can, as many hours as I can, for as little or as much as I can, and do everything I can just to keep a roof over my wife’s head, my boy’s head, and gonna pay the bills and make sure the credit card works and all that kind of stuff, there was no time for Me.

Bill Gasiamis 40:57
My only downtime was to disconnect through alcohol or a joint, having a marijuana joint back then, that was the only way that I could disconnect from all the stuff that I had to endure and put up with that I had no skills to deal with, because I never, I never developed the skills. I was just thrown into the deep end and it was sink or swim, and there was, I couldn’t let down three other people.

Bill Gasiamis 41:24
It would have been terrible. So I did everything I could that I thought was the right thing. The you know, the examples I had was my mum and dad. They just worked forever. My mom stopped working when she couldn’t work anymore, because she had a really bad back. That was it. And then dad and then dad worked as much as he could to achieve exactly the same thing for us that I was now achieving trying to achieve for my kids.

Bill Gasiamis 41:54
When my dad came from a from a country where there was no opportunity to work. They had to leave because there wasn’t an opportunity to make money and work. You could work the farm and the field, but they would have been totally poor the entire time if they stayed there. So they left, and when they had the opportunity to work for them, it’s like all their dreams come true, abundance of work, high paid, low paid didn’t matter.

Bill Gasiamis 42:23
They if you had the right attitude and you asked enough people, you could find a job type of thing. And that was what my dad did. And I remember, you know, he worked shift work. And I remember when I got to about the age of 18, in the job that he did. He was a waterside worker where they unload cargo freight from cargo ships.

Bill Gasiamis 42:49
And he said to me, you’ve got an opportunity if you want to the way that they hired the next generation of employees was through family, and they just said, if you want to get a job, there’s jobs going, just go put your name down, and you’ll get called up, you’ll have a job. And I looked at him and thought, shift work? Are you insane? Why would I go do shift work for I mean, I’m going to be working when I’m supposed to be sleeping.

Bill Gasiamis 43:14
And he would, he was doing that for 20 years. Wow. Coming home sleeping at 7am when we’re waking up, making noise, you know, being annoying kids and all that kind of stuff. He just put up with it all. He did not bat an oily did not complain, he did not whinge. All he did was get up every morning and meet his obligations and I could tell you that my dad is not spiritually connected in tune.

Bill Gasiamis 43:43
My dad is not, I wouldn’t call him wise. He’s not a wiser elder that you go to. He’s a smart guy, and he he’s done great things, but you can’t go to him for emotional support because he doesn’t do he doesn’t do emotions.

Bill Gasiamis 43:58
So that’s how I learned, and I tried to implement that, but implementing that with my upbringing, which was such a cushy, comfortable upbringing compared to what he went through, my there was a disconnect in my soul to my reality, and My soul is going, I don’t know another way. I don’t have another another mentor. I don’t have somebody else to guide me, to shine the light.

Bill Gasiamis 44:29
Do what you know, what you learned. And my soul’s going, don’t do that, don’t do that. And my my brain’s going, that’s the only thing we know how to do. Do that. And it was so difficult to get there your husband. I can’t imagine his story. I don’t know his background, but what I love about it is that since you’ve separated, you guys obviously have been able to experience personal growth, both of you, and it’s a testament to both of you that you’ve been able to.

Bill Gasiamis 45:00
It separate. Realize that you can go a separate your separate ways, find new partners and still be amazing parents and and be kind to each other and love each other and not be what you hear about most of the time with divorce is terrible, yeah, lawyer situations and yeah, arguments, and who’s going to get the VCR and all this dumb shit that, yeah, not really about.

Bill Gasiamis 45:27
It’s, you know, it’s, I love that you guys have been able to find your own path, separately, and that’s brilliant, and even though you started off, well, let’s face it, like the way that you guys got together and married and the way that I got together, we’re pushing shit uphill. We’re behind the eight ball. It’s technically not meant to work out at all. Like, yeah, when you start in a western democracy like that, you know, you’re almost screwed from the beginning, and you’re pushing shit uphill the whole entire time.

Emily Gable 46:11
Yeah and I, you know, our kids came into our lives, and I know I’ve become very spiritual since my stroke. Because I don’t know how you don’t, I mean, you know, when you, when you have a near death experience, it’s kind of like something’s going to happen. So I really feel like my, our, my, our kids picked us. You know, that feels so true to me, and they recognize that my daughter and I talk about it, and they are the most loving kind human beings, these kids.

Emily Gable 46:50
And I really don’t think we have that much say over the behavior of our children. I mean, like to a certain extent, but they are great humans, and we lucked out, you know, we got some good ones because I’ve, I’ve met some parents that are really awesome people, and they just have really unruly children, and they’re like, I don’t know, I don’t know what happened.

Emily Gable 46:50
Like, it’s, you know, they come in with their own agendas, you know, and they teach us a lot. And I’m just so grateful that my kids continue to teach me so much and that they’re so loving, because that’s really what I mean. We showed them that they saw that, and they’re just full of they’re just so full of love. I feel kind of like high from that.

Emily Gable 46:50
I just, I gave my daughter a massage this afternoon. So it just, it feels, it fills me up to be connected to her in that way. And she’s been getting massages since she was an infant. So she’s like, you know, I put my hand on her, and she grabs it, and she makes me massage her. Like, even in passing, my son is. He’s always very ticklish, so he’s not as much into that, but he gives the best hugs. And he’s now taller than me. He’s like, six foot tall, of course. So instead of my little boy, he’s my big little boy.

Bill Gasiamis 48:17
I was encouraged by the fact of how forgiving kids could be. Like I wasn’t a terrible dad or anything, but I was properly cranky, you know, and I used to misbehave as a parent, and I used to think that I was the I’m the top of the food chain. You guys all need to toe the line, and you need to be quiet, and you need to do what I say and and it never went well, you know, they’re both right, so I should be guiding them, not dragging them along the path, you know, and making them fit my criteria for how men should behave.

Bill Gasiamis 49:01
You know, they’re different than me, so one of the blessings that came from my stroke was that opportunity to deal with what I thought was my bad behavior, apologize for it profusely, like all the time over the next few years, because I thought I might die and not be around, and I didn’t want him to remember me as a cranky bastard and and now, as adults, as a 25 year old and a 29 year old, we have the best relationship we have developed.

Bill Gasiamis 49:39
It has become better and better, after all the drama that I went through, but it was one of my one of my goals, I suppose, to ensure that I re, re assessed everything in my life, especially my. Relationships, and then went out of my way to correct what I was responsible for, not their behavior. I didn’t, I didn’t, and I didn’t expect them to step up and correct their behavior or do anything.

Bill Gasiamis 50:12
All I did was just became the example of somebody who realized that perhaps they were wrong in some instances, and therefore altered, altered the path, and changed the the way that he behaved, reacted, responded, spoke, etc, and that led them to me, led them to come back like on their own.

Bill Gasiamis 50:34
I didn’t need to drag that’s awesome. So, you know, it is amazing. And it sounds like you’ve had and this is what I love about people who come and share their learnings about strokers, even in your ignorance as a youngster in your 20s, and me, in my ignorance, somehow, it was the perfect springboard to get us here.

Bill Gasiamis 51:04
Even though I described myself as being dumb and unwise and all those things in my 20s, and I say it from a loving kindness, kind of like I’m trying to play it down. I don’t want to be hard on myself when I say that about my past self, but it was the perfect springboard to get me to this stage where you and I are talking about these things that have worked out.

Emily Gable 51:33
Yeah, it feels like there’s I see little messages and signs and everything. Now, not to get really cliche, but I’m like, well, it’s like the sliding doors, and I see it all the time, like every day. Now, like, Okay, that didn’t happen for a reason. What does that mean for me? Maybe it doesn’t happen every day, but when things like that do happen, I’m like, there’s some reason why, you know, the power went out and I couldn’t use my computer, you know, and I, instead, I did this other thing, and these things happened.

Emily Gable 52:15
And I feel like it’s been opening me up to receiving the messages of the universe, basically, um, I wanted to tell you about when I interviewed with you the first time. I didn’t listen to it until I was my my dad died. I had to go. He was in Mexico. I got a phone call from his friend, and I was, it was, it was Labor Day weekend. And I was like, This is it, isn’t it? And he’s like, I don’t no, no, no.

Health Journey and Blood Pressure Issues

Emily Gable 52:52
And I’m like, yeah, he’s gonna die, isn’t he? Like, soon, and I’m the only person, like, I’m I’m it, I’m the only family. I’m his only child who was going to step up and do anything. So I flew to Mexico, like right away. It was a long trip. Whatever I did, all the stuff, watched him die. It took, took, like five days. He was liver kidney failure, he filled up with fluids.

Emily Gable 53:20
Was moaning the whole time. I don’t want to die like that. I’d rather have an accident. I’ve had enough time in bed. I don’t need a long suffering, you know? I’d rather, actually rather, like I’d rather just not wake up one night. You know, I don’t need to suffer. I’ve spent enough time on my back in a bed. I don’t need to be longer on out anything. You know what I’m talking about, like, just I put in, I put in my hours. I’m good, that’s it.

Emily Gable 53:53
Anyway, I so then I had to clean up his stuff, and when I flew home, I was like, I’m gonna listen to that podcast episode now. Like, why? Then? Because I was, I was talking to my boyfriend about this last night. I love to listen to heavy shit during heavy times in my life, like, I’ll watch some tragic movie at a tragic time in my life. So I was like, Let me listen to that podcast episode I did back in May.

Emily Gable 54:27
And I think it took a little bit to get it out, but it had been a while out for a while, so I got it on, and I’m listening to it. And I had to transfer planes, so I don’t think I listened to all of it in one sitting, and I get onto the last plane back to I had to fly to Newark, New Jersey, which is not a good airport anymore, but I then had to drive two hours home after that, so it’s going to be a really long day. So I was sitting on the plane next to this guy named Bill from Melbourne, Australia.

Emily Gable 55:01
He was going to visit his Well, he was actually from Pennsylvania, from this little, tiny town in the mountains where my aunt and uncle lived, like, like, fifth population 50. And he and I knew it. I knew the town and his and I had just been listening to, like this podcast with you, Bill in Melbourne, and then it was like, I sat next to this guy, and they’d been traveling all day from Australia, and they were in their last leg.

Emily Gable 55:32
It was like, Texas to New Jersey. And yeah, he and we got to talking, and I’m sitting there in the airplane seat. My dad’s ashes are in a bag underneath the plane, and and, and that I was just like, whoa. Like, this was meant to be, that I hopped on this flight, and all of it lined up so little like things like that, where it’s this huge sign to me of I’m in the right place at the right time. That happens to me a lot when I went because I My eyes are open to it.

Bill Gasiamis 56:06
I love that story. That’s such an amazing story. Your what you’re I think what you’re describing is, you know, when you said, the lights went out and we don’t have any lights, and it’s dark, and I was on my computer working, and now I can’t work. And what does that mean? That willingness to ask, what else could this mean than just what a pain in the ass the lights, you know, that willingness to ask, what does it?

Bill Gasiamis 56:40
What else could this mean? It could mean I’ve got more time to sit next to my daughter. I’ve got more time to read a book. I can I have a memory of that day when the lights went out and everyone was running around looking for candles, you know, like, whatever it is. I think these things happen in life, to, uh, to give us the opportunity to ask.

Bill Gasiamis 57:06
What else could this mean? If only you know, to ask the question? I think the biggest challenge that I had as a younger person was I didn’t know that there’s this really cool question you can ask for everything and get a completely different reality from it. And it’s what you said. It’s like, Okay, what else could this mean? I, I, I went to the most, worst event course training program in 2011 that, oh, my god, that was just a complete waste of money from a what I was meant to learn there, and why I went there.

Bill Gasiamis 57:47
I got zero value, paid five grand in 2011 Wow, to be there, right? Thought I was going to get all this amazing business information, and I was going to come back and I was going to, you know, it was the bill that was going to work out how to work more harder, make more money. That guy was going to this course.

Bill Gasiamis 58:10
And at that course, I’m not sure how, but there’s 10 people from that course all kind of just found each other, like magnets and just wolf for the three or four days that we were there, hung out with each other the entire time of on all the breaks, etc, and we tried to find ourselves in the in the training as well, so that we could interact with each other during the training.

Bill Gasiamis 58:35
And in that course, that course was about three or four months before I’ve had the first brain hemorrhage in February, 2012 and in that course, happened to be so my brain hemorrhage, I’m a I’m a bit of a drama queen, so I dragged out my illness for as long as I could. 2012 I had two bleeds. 2014 I had a second bleed in November, and in November also had brain surgery, and then I had to learn how to walk again.

Emily’s Experience with Beta Blockers

Bill Gasiamis 59:03
So I dragged it out all for about the best part of about three years, when I was in the thick of the drama, not the healing kind of still the tough part, stroke and and in that course, was a guy who his name was David. I’ve written about him.

Bill Gasiamis 59:25
I have an acknowledgement in my book about him. He used to say to me, why don’t you just come to meet me for lunch at my office on this day, and I was at home, not working, tripping out of my head all the time because I was dealing with stroke and all that kind of stuff. There was a blood clot in my head about the size of a golf ball, just, you know, impacting all my brain and all that kind of stuff.

Bill Gasiamis 59:55
I wasn’t capable of doing almost anything. Yet somehow I would find myself at lunch with David, and he would give me an hour of his time once a week or twice, a month, something like that. And that’s the only time I ever interacted with him in the course. And then seven or eight months later, at lunch with him, he would, I don’t know, like, it’s like he gave me some meaning, some purpose, something.

Bill Gasiamis 1:00:23
And after that time, the only other time he interacted with me was, there’s another course I’m going to you should attend it. I went to that course with him, and that was in 2014 we did the course and and I haven’t interacted with him again, but the learnings that I got from that guy and that interaction, the guy who turned up just at the right time, a few months before the stroke, who reached out to me, who I didn’t reach out to, who reached out to me and helped me In for no return whatsoever, just blows my mind.

Bill Gasiamis 1:01:02
My best friend, another lady who was at that course, her name was her name is Louise. She and I have been as thick as thieves, although we don’t see each other too much since then. And she was my coach, my first life coach, confidant, major cheerleader, just the most amazing person who, every time I needed to get through a tough time, she would happen to just call at the most perfect time, and now she’s going through a bit of a tough time herself, so I’ve been that person for her.

Bill Gasiamis 1:01:46
That happened at that most terrible, most ridiculous, expensive course. And in that course, there was another two or three people who I still see now, one of whom has had a stroke. Just recently, reached out to me to go, I’ve just had a stroke, and I’m like, wow, I’ve got you no worries. So it’s such a weird thing. It’s like, what that course could have been? What a waste of money. I’m never going back.

Bill Gasiamis 1:02:15
I don’t want to do any of that stuff again. I’m never doing another course again. It actually became, what else could this be? What else could I turn it into? And I turned it into the most amazing, supportive, friendly, caring, loving friends that far that has paid a dividend, far more amazing and my return on $5,000 is just, you know, you can’t put, you can’t put a price on it. It’s just unbelievable. And that’s kind of where I feel you’re that’s how you’re moving.

Emily Gable 1:02:58
Yeah, for sure, for sure. I i Also, right now, I eventually, I forget. I don’t really, I think it’s since my divorce. I’m very particular about how I spend my time and with whom, like I have no tolerance for spending time with anyone I don’t want to be around. Like, I just, just to me. I’m, like, Why? Why would I? Why would I do that?

Emily Gable 1:03:28
There’s no reason. Like, I have two dogs that I love. I’d rather be home hanging out with them, yeah, or my kids, you know, but and doing things that don’t appeal to me, um, you know, when I was younger, maybe, you know, definitely, when I was in my early 20s, I’d be like, let’s check it out. Like, let’s just see and now, um, yeah, why would I do that?

Emily Gable 1:03:52
You know, if I didn’t, if I didn’t see any thing appealing in it, for some reason or another, I’m not going to try. It’s not that I don’t want to try new things. I just don’t feel like everything is worth my time, because I know how important it is for me to feel rested, to feel like I’m loved, and being somewhere where I’m like, completely disoriented, and maybe I have to, like, sleep less, or, I don’t know what you know, different scenarios I have no interest if it’s not filling your cup. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Bill Gasiamis 1:04:34
It’s not about being disconnected. It’s not about being you’re not doing it through lack of for or through fear. You know people do? Yeah? Do you know agoraphobia? I’m not going in there because I’m I’m fearful. I’m not avoiding it because it’s a tough walk. I’m not a. Avoiding it because I’m avoiding it because does it fill my cup? It’s a completely different reason. It’s like what you’re doing is prioritizing your desires, your needs, over somebody else’s needs and desires.

Emily Gable 1:05:14
Yeah, and one of another thing that I do that is a perspective that I’ve gained more from when I broke my ankle, but also from my stroke. I park as far away from the store as I possibly can, because I can walk. Every time I’m like, yeah, there’s a space that’s close by, but I can walk, so I’m going to park far away and I can walk, and that’s the reason why honestly.

Lyme Disease Diagnosis and Treatment

Emily Gable 1:05:45
And, you know, I don’t take it for granted, because there’s been so much of my life when I haven’t been able to walk, I had a handicap sticker, and I did not like it. I did not enjoy being in that place where I had to be close to where I was going because I couldn’t figure out how to walk. So you know now I’m like, I’m going to park far away because I can.

Bill Gasiamis 1:06:13
Gratitude is an interesting concept as well. I think what you’re talking about is gratitude for what you have regained, and what has come back? And even for people who haven’t regained the level of walking that perhaps they wanted to, maybe there’s other areas of gratitude that they can tap into, what they can push yourself in a wheelchair, access an electric wheelchair like I don’t know what it is for you, but you need to find the thing that you can be grateful for.

Bill Gasiamis 1:06:42
I can relate to what you said about the parking Okay, so my wife and I, we go out with a couple who is a friend of mine. The lady is a friend of mine from school, so I’ve known him forever. Her partner is an amazing guy, but he does the Let’s drive around the block a few times to get the closest spot. And I’m like, we’re in the vicinity. There’s a spot.

Bill Gasiamis 1:07:11
Why don’t I just park there? And he’ll always go what we have to park three kilometers away. And I’m like, doesn’t matter, man, we’ll walk. It’s not too far, you know, we’ll get there. We’ll be fine. I’m all about just going. Okay, here we are nearby. Grab that spot. Let’s go. And then, of course, just so he can harass me even more as we’re walking down further to the venue.

Bill Gasiamis 1:07:34
Yeah, there’s another one. There’s another one. Why couldn’t we park there? Bill, I don’t know. Man, it doesn’t matter. We parked already. We would the car’s safe. We’re walking. It’s all. We’re going to get there and then walk back, and we’ll burn, burn off some of the calories that we’re going to consume, you know, if we have too much to eat or whatever.

Bill Gasiamis 1:07:53
And then the other thing I do is escalators and stairs. So if I find escalators and there’s stairs next to them. It sucks walking on the stairs because my left leg scissors up and it’s hard, and I’ve gotta hold onto the rail and everything, but always take the stairs the same reason. Yeah, because and it It blows my mind when I see people, you know, those travelators, the ones that you see at the airports.

Emily Gable 1:08:24
We call them people walkers, yeah, I don’t know why, yeah. That just like, move.

Bill Gasiamis 1:08:29
Where people walk on, stand on them and then stop moving, yeah, but the travelator can do the job for them, yeah. It’s like what the hell are you doing? Yeah, why are you stopping on this thing?

Emily Gable 1:08:43
Because they want to look at their phone.

Bill Gasiamis 1:08:46
Or why when the escalator is going down, I can understand if you, if you’re not walking up an escalator because you might not be able to, might be hard. I get it, yeah, but when the escalator is going down, for most people, that’s a doable task. You can still walk while the escalator is going down, and you can still walk on the travelator.

Bill Gasiamis 1:09:06
And I’m like, you, I’m if I’m on a travelator, because it’s a very long distance to the terminal, I’m walking on the travelator, so I’m just getting that to get me there a little bit quicker, you know, a 30 seconds quicker. And the staircases, I always take the stairs instead of the escalator, or the lift, what we call the lift, you guys call the elevator.

Emily Gable 1:09:33
Yeah. I actually get really dizzy on those, what you’re calling the travelators. I can’t I can’t walk on I can’t go on them, because I think it’s the speed, I don’t know, because I, you know, riding a bike, you go fast, but when I stop, my brain hasn’t caught up, and so I get kind of vertigo when I’m done. I’m like, Whoa. I get really disoriented.

Emily Gable 1:10:09
But I also get really disoriented flying in an airplane too. How the relationship of my body to the ground like the in that feeling when I had the stroke, it was like the ground dropped out from under me, and there was no up or down, left or right, side to side like nothing, and it was just like I was existing in space, but I didn’t know how.

Emily Gable 1:10:22
And so I, when I, when I fly, I can get into a state like that really easily. When I’m disoriented in my surroundings, so only being able to see what’s inside the plane, but feeling things is like it messes, you know, and it’s also anxiety, for sure. I don’t really like the idea of the of flying, but then it’s it’s just disorienting for my brain, for my sense of balance.

Bill Gasiamis 1:11:06
Yeah, humans not meant to be in the air in a tin can.

Emily Gable 1:11:11
Right. Yeah. It is a weird experience in general. But with after the stroke, like, definitely a lot weirder. Yeah, yeah, okay. And traveling getting to get being exhausted from traveling. The last time I flew was last year. I my kids and I went to Puerto Rico, and our flight was delayed by eight hours, and we got home at 6am was long day, and I was so exhausted, I can’t sleep on planes for this very reason of this disorientation and like, if I if I put close my eyes, I start spinning.

Emily Gable 1:11:53
So it helps me to keep my eyes open, even when I’m exhausted. And I got home and I was sick for a week, and I knew, and I it’s like, I knew when I maybe I it was a self fulfilling prophecy, but it was. It’s like when they said the plane was delayed again and again and again, I was like, oh, no, I can’t not sleep. And my kids are like, you’ll be fine. I was like, No, you don’t understand. I need sleep. I have to sleep in this body at this point in my life, like it’s not a negotiable thing.

Bill Gasiamis 1:12:24
I’m the same as you the time zones. The changing of time zones really puts me out of whack and that I need to sleep thing, yeah. That is, yeah. It’s a not I should sleep, or I could sleep. Like I must sleep. I have to sleep, yes. And I know that too, because I am then not capable of doing anything or being in the world, in the world that I need to be in the next two or three days if I don’t get sleep.

Bill Gasiamis 1:12:54
And I’m the same, I don’t sleep on planes. I can’t do it. Yeah, and then you suffer the consequences. And I kind of almost think about, well, was it, was it even worth it? But of course, you know, being away with somebody in a different place, doing something, meeting your family, where it’s all worth it, but yeah, Geez, it’s such a big price to pay afterwards on the return.

Emily Gable 1:13:21
Sure, it is definitely 100%

Bill Gasiamis 1:13:26
Yeah, you’re 17 years post now. How connected are you to that whole stroke journey? I know that. We’ve spoken about stroke and all that stuff, and I talk about my stroke like it’s something that happened to me in the past. So I’m not kind of connected to it, although I live with the deficits of it and the daily challenges that that causes. I’ve I’ve almost separated the two things that are happening now to what the events of the past were, were like. It’s kind of my new normal, weird, yeah, yeah. What’s it like for you to experience yourself now 17 years post?

Emily Gable 1:14:14
Yeah? Um, well, I still have these temperature, lack of temperature sensations, although I have regained some of that on my face, which I like on a really hot day. A few years ago, I held up a cold drink to my face, and I was like, oh my god, I can feel that it’s cold. And I was so excited, because that wasn’t possible before. So the doctors say, which I call medical vexing, you’ll never feel like this, you’ll never do these things.

Emily Gable 1:14:50
And I just think that’s a bunch of BS because, you know, that’s why I say, that’s why I call it medical vexing. It’s like, they’re telling you that’s not going to happen. I’m like, How do you know? So they’re like, if you. Can’t feel the change in, you know, a year, then it’s probably always going to be like that. Well, that’s not true. I really think that anything is possible.

Emily Gable 1:15:09
So, you know, people that are listening that think, Oh, I’m never going to walk again. I’m never going to be like this or that again. Anything’s possible. Really, anything is possible. And I didn’t put my mind to like, I’m going to feel temperature again on my face. But it happened, I have a I had a feeding tube to my stomach, so I have, like, a second belly button.

Emily Gable 1:15:34
I have problems swallowing still sometimes, like when I’m stressed, I can’t eat rice in combination with anything, like, if I eat rice and vegetables or rice and chicken, like, if I’m chewing the things in my mouth at the same time, I can’t swallow it. But I can eat just rice. I don’t know what that’s about. So in general, I don’t eat that much.

Emily Gable 1:15:59
Or, like, like a bready thing, like a scone or something like that. A lot of times I can’t swallow it or pizza, but I have realized that a lot of it has to do with my biggest nerve and being like relaxing myself, and then my swallowing mechanism starts up again. I had a lot of that happen when I was in the divorce phase of my relationship with my ex, and I wasn’t able to swallow a lot when I was with him.

Emily Gable 1:16:33
And then once we split up, that stopped. And I was like, Oh, interesting. Okay, that was a that was a stress thing. But I really do think that that the the swallowing mechanism is related to the stroke. Since that was gone, I have worked really hard to regain balance. That was a really difficult thing for me to do, was that bilateral, like, can I balance on the right foot? Can I balance on the left foot? How is that?

Emily Gable 1:17:06
And it just takes work and consistency to keep, keep practicing, like, little by little. You know, just spending a couple minutes on it a week, even, I’ve progressed to now I can, like, do a like, I can keep one leg down on the ground and have one leg up and reach down and touch the ground without needing to fall over immediately, and not keeping the other I started with just kick standing my leg, the opposite leg, and not even going down on the floor.

Emily Gable 1:17:39
You just, like, progress, just a little little little, little every time. And I feel more confident with that than I ever did before. So you know, if I weren’t to practice balance stuff, I would quickly be out of balance. So it just, it’s like, it’s not like, Oh, I did that. Now I’ve reached that goal. Now I’m done. It’s like, no, I got, I just, you just got to keep working on it all the time. Yeah, so that those are the main things.

The Importance of Self-Compassion and Support after Stroke in Pregnancy

Bill Gasiamis 1:18:07
You seem calm. And when I spoke to you last time, you even seemed calm, kind of like very thoughtful, very deliberate with your actions, with the things that you go about. Were you calm during the tough times, during that time when everything was happening at once and coming out of nowhere.

Emily Gable 1:18:33
I think I was because I didn’t have much of a voice. Yeah, here comes my baby. Say hi. This was my baby in my belly. He’s interviewing me about stroke.

Bill Gasiamis 1:18:53
Mate how are you? I’m good. How are you? Yeah, good, good. Let us know. If you don’t want this on the podcast, we’ll edit it out. But if you do, it’s staying.

Emily Gable 1:19:01
I don’t mind.

Bill Gasiamis 1:19:05
It’s good to see the person who was in the belly, uh, 17 years ago when your mom was going through all that stuff.

Emily Gable 1:19:14
He’s a healthy, tall boy.

Bill Gasiamis 1:19:18
Fantastic! Great to see you.

Emily Gable 1:19:25
Yeah. So, I think I was calm. I don’t know that I was able to express myself the way I would have wanted to, because I was so disoriented and so confused. Yeah, I think that’s part of why I had so much like medical mistreatment, because I wasn’t able to speak up for myself. Okay, makes complete sense. Yeah. Yeah, but the one thing that I was able to draw on was my breath. And that’s been something that I keep coming back to, is realizing, like, Oh, I’m breathing, and that’s what qualifies us to be alive, is the breath.

Bill Gasiamis 1:20:16
So from all of that stuff, you just narrow it down. That’s one thing I’m doing that. That’s where we start.

Emily Gable 1:20:24
Yeah, you know when in the MRI machine, when they’re the things are banging. I couldn’t swallow. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what was going on. It was just free, just breathe and watching, and then watching my dad die. I watched it happen. He took his last breath. I mean, that’s real. You’re not alive when you don’t breathe anymore.

Emily Gable 1:20:50
So you know, we’re all here, hearing things, and we’re breathing. And that’s what I always come back to, is my breath. I can breathe, and consciously breathing. And I teach different movement modalities, but this the center focus of all of it is breathing and and bringing yourself to your breath.

Bill Gasiamis 1:21:10
I’ve had headaches for probably the last six months, and I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of it. At the beginning, I, you know, overlooked it. I didn’t think about it. It was this. It’s that I need, I need a paracetamol. I need this, all sorts of things. Anyhow, it’s gone to the point where enough’s enough. So I went to, I went to the GP, and I said, I need it.

Bill Gasiamis 1:21:34
I need a MRI. Get us an MRI. That was about three weeks ago when I did the MRI. And exactly what you said, Go in the machine. It’s making all the noise. And I’m not typically claustrophobic, but I tell you what, I don’t enjoy being in an MRI, especially the amount of MRIs that I’ve had in the last, 13 years, 14 years, and I started to freak out.

Bill Gasiamis 1:22:01
And before I went in, you know, I’m not even in yet, and I’m getting worked up about it, and I just started breathing. That’s exactly why he said it. Started breathing. I breathed my way through it, and because I was doing such a good job, 27 minutes went by really quickly. I didn’t know the time frame. And the nurse, the, I think it was a nurse who was in there, said, Hey, how you going? Are you okay? And broke me out of my focus and my concentration. And as soon as she said that, no, get me out.

Bill Gasiamis 1:22:38
I gotta come out. Yeah, she comes out, she gets me out. And I said to her, how much longer do we have left? She said, we only have three minutes. I said, Okay, give me a few minutes. Let me start breathing, and then once I calm myself again, we’ll go in for the next three minutes. And sure enough, we got through it.

Bill Gasiamis 1:23:00
It was the only thing that was going to get me through it, being in my head trying to convince myself wasn’t going to do it. Not one, not one bit, yeah, and it was just such a gift to have that so. Long story short, is MRIs clear. There’s nothing in my head that is causing the headaches. But three. But today’s Friday, where we’re recording Friday, Melbourne time, Sunday.

Bill Gasiamis 1:23:28
A few days ago, I was in hospital because my blood pressure had got to 170 over 110 Wow. And it was like that for about two days. And I thought, forget this thing. We’re gonna go to the hospital. Got them to check me out. They did a CT scan that proved to be clear as well. So now I’ve got an MRI and a CT scan.

Bill Gasiamis 1:23:48
Soon, we’re going to go to the neurologist to compare them to the old ones from 2016 when I did my last one, just to make sure nothing’s changed. But what they’re diagnosed was high blood pressure, but out of nowhere, now I’m dealing with high blood pressure. Isn’t such a bad thing, because, you know, this day and age, you can get a little tablet take it once a day, yes, and all of a sudden, the headaches are gone.

The Role of Community and Support in Recovery from Stroke in Pregnancy

Bill Gasiamis 1:24:14
My blood pressure has come back to normal. When you check it, you know it’s back to normal. I can feel it when it’s high, because my head starts hurting, and I go and see my chiropractor. My chiropractor is a they call him a network chiropractor. They don’t crack, they just touch and what is the first thing he say about high blood pressure, start breathing, just learn how to breathe. That’s it okay. I’m listening.

Emily Gable 1:24:48
I have had high blood pressure, and I’m on blood pressure meds right now. For that very thing, it’s I was getting headaches, and every time I would go to the doctor. My blood pressure would be high, like, just for whatever checkup. And they’d and I’d say, I have white coat syndrome, because I do.

Emily Gable 1:25:08
But they were like, Okay, get a blood pressure cough at home and do it there, you know? And then I was like, that’s fair. And it was high at home. And then I went, and finally I went to the GYN, the gynecologist, and she was like, Stop it. You’re taking this medicine now. You’re don’t BS me about this white coat thing anymore, like you need. And I stopped having headaches.

Emily Gable 1:25:34
And I’m like, You know what? It’s okay, because I had these horrible memories of they gave me beta blockers for blood pressure when I had the stroke, which made me feel so terrible, and they don’t they, they don’t have to give you those. There’s other things. The beta blockers just made me feel like really disoriented, and out of it, they made me dizzy. And then they give you medication to make you not dizzy, but that can give you high blood pressure. Like everything causes the other thing. So I had to, like, wipe that clean, in my mind, got some something, and that really helps.

Bill Gasiamis 1:26:14
I just, you know, I’ve had 30 at a 37 I had brain hemorrhage. At 40 I had brain surgery. At 42 I had thyroid surgery to remove half of my thyroid, because a large an enlarged gland a goiter, what they call a goiter. So had to deal with that, recover from that, and now high blood pressure just out of nowhere. Well, what seems like out of nowhere.

Bill Gasiamis 1:26:45
I don’t know how long I’ve had it for, because I’ve never had any symptoms that would suggest that there was something wrong, until all these crazy headaches for months now. And I have to remind myself, because I did the whole why. Why do I need to have this now? Why do i Why does this need to happen? I have to remind myself about the whole going.

Bill Gasiamis 1:27:11
Often say in my podcast, when I speak to people, you’re not going to get through life unscathed if you get through life and you’re at 99 and nothing has ever gone wrong for you. You haven’t lived, you haven’t lived a life, and it’s like, okay, I could get down about this as well and have to deal with this as well, or I can just be grateful that there is a little pill that somebody came up with that helps to bring it down and is going to extend my life.

Bill Gasiamis 1:27:46
And I’m not going to have another stroke because of high blood pressure, another hemorrhage because, yeah, now that’s where that’s that hit is heading, if you don’t deal with it. I know interviewed tons of people who have had a brain hemorrhage because of high blood pressure that they neglected or didn’t know they had.

Bill Gasiamis 1:28:04
Yeah, and I’m just oh, well, here we go. Here we go again. Learn something from this? What can I learn from this? What can I do to guide people, encourage people, tell them it’s going to be okay. You know, maybe I can live with 10 different bits of me missing and seven ailments and still be living a meaningful and purposeful life. Maybe that’s definitely possible. Why not?

Emily Gable 1:28:36
And it might just be also like little tweaks that can be done. Who knows? Who knows? You know, like with the blood pressure thing, I’ve been listening to some like scientific information about, like, how to address it with exercise, like, the most targeted, specific ways. And I’ve, I’ve been, I was do, I was on a I was on a roll of doing this, and then I got line, and my energy level just plummeted. And I was like, Well, I’m not doing that anymore.

Bill Gasiamis 1:29:15
Tell me about lime. Like, what is that and how does it manifest? Or what does it feel like?

Emily Gable 1:29:20
Yeah. So I had a tick bite. I had a tick embedded in my side, It had looking down towards my torso. My breast was in the way, blocking it so I didn’t see it, which sucks, because if I had actually seen it, I would have been like, there’s a tick, but I felt this thing on my side that I thought was a scab, but it was really like a tick embedded in me. And I don’t you must not have lime in Australia. Hopefully it hasn’t made it there.

Bill Gasiamis 1:29:56
I’ve never heard of it in Australia, but I know of people who have had it. I. Think always the people I’ve heard have had it, picked it up somewhere else I think, I feel like it’s not a big problem here.

Emily Gable 1:30:10
It’s a really dense, there’s so many ticks in the Northeast where I live, and so, you know, I would I take my dogs for a hike and pull like, 20 off of them that are crawling on their skin. So we did a full tick check, like before we came in. After the hike, I changed, I took off my clothes, took a shower, you know, got dressed, we went out, came back that night. I was like, hm, it feels like a scab.

Emily Gable 1:30:36
That’s interesting, but I was so tired, didn’t think anything of it. Went to sleep. The next morning, woke up, took a shower. After the shower, I am like, getting dressed, and I’m like, oh, oh, that’s a tick. But so it had been embedded in me for at least, probably 12 to 15 hours, maybe even 24 you know, sometimes they fall off like it might have been on the dog, and it was crawling on the floor, and then crawled up on my leg.

Emily Gable 1:31:03
You know, they’re sneaky little buggers. They’re kind of like creepy, the way that they just appear. And, and it was a bigger one. Everyone says, oh, deer ticks are the only ones that carry line, which are these tiny little but it was a bigger tick. It was, I call them, I call them dog ticks. I know that’s not what they are formally, but it’s bigger. You can see it like, it’s pretty obvious what it is.

Emily Gable 1:31:34
You know, it’s the size of, like, the top of a pen, we’ll say like the like, the part that is rounded at the top, not not where you write, but the other end, the deer tick is like the point of the pen. It’s tiny, wow. So we pulled it out, but the head was stuck in it. But apparently it doesn’t matter if it’s infected, the longer it’s in you, the more chance that you already have something.

Emily Gable 1:32:01
So that week, I was feeling really achy in my sacrum, and I was like this, and I thought it was transference, because I had a client that had a sacrum issue that week. And I was like, this is weird, because I I’m really good at my boundaries with clients and, like, not taking on their stuff, because I would be a wreck if I did. So I was like, wow, that’s weird.

Emily Gable 1:32:26
I must have taken on her stuff. I have these weird aches in my sacrum. And then, and that was like, maybe Tuesday, and I was, I don’t know, I was just feeling like a little weird achiness that wasn’t like I normally do. And then it was, I took my daughter to a concert. She was really sick. She had a cold. She was like, in bed on Saturday, and Saturday afternoon, it was like, I hit a wall, and it was like, really bad flu symptoms, like fever, achy joints, sweating, freezing cold, all that stuff.

Emily Gable 1:33:11
And then it was Mother’s Day, and I was like, Oh God, I don’t know what is happening to me. And I felt like, you know, all out of sorts. I had really intense brain fog, which I never experienced before fully, where it was like, there was like a it was like my glasses had, it would be like, if I, if you wore glasses with a foggy lens all the time. It’s the only way I can describe it.

Emily Gable 1:33:38
I just felt like I couldn’t think clearly, like I couldn’t I was like, Okay, I’ll just watch TV. And even that, I was like, I don’t even know what I’m watching. Like, what’s the point? I just wanted to sit and like, stare, you know, like, zone out. And then I took myself to urgent care like I I was hoping my kids would be like, I’ll take you, but I took myself, and the the person there, was like, I’m not even going to test you, because every single symptom I had was for was Lyme, and I had the tick bite.

Emily Gable 1:34:15
So he took the tick head out, prescribed me 28 days of doxycycline, because that’s been proven to like, knock the it’s a it’s a bacterial infection. And what happens is the antibodies stay in your body forever or for a long time, but if it goes unchecked, it can enter your nervous system, your cardiovascular system, like all these different parts of your lymphatic system.

Emily Gable 1:34:47
So it it attacks the immune system, but then it can attack people can have, like, really intense cardiac symptoms, respiratory symptoms, like years down the line, if they didn’t know so I know a lot of people. That, you know, maybe they got bit by a tick two years before, and then they’re like, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

Emily Gable 1:35:05
And it takes a while for them to figure out they have Lyme they go through around, you know, the doxycycline at that point is doing something, but it’s, it’s really good if you get it right away. So I got it right away, taking the doxycycline absolutely sucked. I felt nauseous every day for 28 days the first two weeks, like the first week, I was still like bad flu symptoms didn’t leave my couch.

Emily Gable 1:35:32
Basically, I didn’t work. I couldn’t I couldn’t do anything. Week Two after that, I was moving around a little bit more. I still didn’t feel like completely myself. And then the last two weeks of it, I felt better enough like I was going to the gym. I wasn’t doing anything crazy, but I was just trying to move my body a little bit.

Emily Gable 1:35:54
And then I finished it on June 8, and then I and then I actually, I had talked to a woman about this, and she said, the day I stopped taking it, I felt like a different person and and maybe it was because I heard her say this, but that’s what happened. I just felt like, oh my gosh, I’m done. I’m free.

Bill Gasiamis 1:36:14
And also, because June the eighth is my birthday.

Emily Gable 1:36:18
Yes, I knew you were a Gemini, yes.

Bill Gasiamis 1:36:27
You’re a Gemini too?

Emily Gable 1:36:29
Yeah? June 13.

Bill Gasiamis 1:36:34
Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, you were, yeah. Were you June 8? Everything kind of settled. And then was it okay after that?

Therapy and Rehabilitation in Stroke in Pregnancy Recovery 

Emily Gable 1:36:43
Yeah, June 8 was actually the night of June 8 was my last dose. And then June 9, I woke up and I felt better. I’m taking some, like, really powerful herbs right now that I probably going to take for the next six months to, like, support my immune system that it’s part of a line protocol, so I take those once a day and yeah, I’m just trying to sleep when I need to, you know, stay hydrated. Be gentle with myself.

Emily Gable 1:37:20
Yeah. That’s really important.

Emily Gable 1:37:23
those are things that I learned after my stroke. Like, have grace with myself. Like, don’t think that I should be doing something if I’m more, like, if it’s a hard No, intuitionally, then I’m just not going to do it.

Bill Gasiamis 1:37:38
Be kind with yourself. It’s such a it’s such a great thing to learn and then to be able to apply it to many different things in life. I made a mistake that’s right. Be kind to yourself. I was really hard on myself actually, probably about two weeks ago, beating myself up about a business decision that I made that cost us six grand.

Bill Gasiamis 1:38:00
We don’t have a spare six grand to just lose on anything, right? I don’t know who does, but I definitely don’t. And, oh man, I didn’t sleep for literally, you know, I’m pretty that night and the night before, so for about two nights, I just had myself in this space, this mental space of like being your idiot, you know this and that, which I normally don’t do.

Bill Gasiamis 1:38:28
I don’t normally do that to myself. But what it also impacted was my business partner, not just me, and that made it a little bit worse, and I felt bad for what I had done for him and all that kind of stuff. And it’s like, dude, and I kind of needed him to get me over the line to almost forgive me for having done it. I went and saw him and we had a conversation about it.

Bill Gasiamis 1:38:55
So what I did was, instead of, you know, I have a property maintenance business. So when you charge people $10,000 to do something at their house, the only thing in the last 20 years, the only thing I ever get pulled up for is, oh, I think you forgot to do that thing you said you were going to do as part of the 10,000 okay. Oh, sweet, sorry about that.

Bill Gasiamis 1:39:16
I’ll go and get it done for you. What I did was I that $10,000 price? For example, I told the customer we are that includes all this other work that they didn’t actually ask us to do. So I gave her a price at the beginning, two months ago. This is stroke, brain impacting these decisions. I gave her a price to do 10 tasks. We I knew it was in writing, in email, in the quote everywhere, and when I sent the boys to do the task, or when I was with them on site, I said to him, you’re doing these 10 tasks.

Bill Gasiamis 1:39:55
But for some reason, I added another task that the customer didn’t ask for, wasn’t getting charged for, didn’t expect and I had four guys spend three days doing this task that wasn’t part of the job, and the customer rang me and said, day one. And said, I’m not sure. Are we still in the scope that we spoke about? But I’m like, Yeah, for sure. The guys are going out there. She goes, I’m not sure if we are paying you to do this extra work.

Bill Gasiamis 1:40:33
I said, No, you definitely aren’t paying extra for it. You’re paying the amount that we agreed to on the quote, etc. And she’s going, are you sure? And I’ve got Yeah. And then I worked it out. About two or three days later, the coin dropped, and it’s like, oh my God, I am spending money to do something that the customer hasn’t asked for no reason.

Bill Gasiamis 1:40:57
And then it was a downward spiral after that, it was you idiot, you this, you that, can’t sleep, your business partner, the guys, all these things just got out of hand. I had the forgiveness of my business partner, and that made it a little better. And then I had to do that to myself. I had to forgive myself. Just do the thing that I keep doing, because strokes cost me way more than $6,000 hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Bill Gasiamis 1:41:29
Stroke has caused cost me, yeah, I have to do the whole the only way I got through that was to say, in a scheme of a lifetime, even if it’s $200,000 like, doesn’t make a difference. Like, it doesn’t matter. Really doesn’t matter. Sure, it was amazing to have it if I could have so the six grand doesn’t really mean anything. It’s a terrible mistake. It means that, you know, we’re going to struggle to pay this bill for two weeks, compared to just being able to pay it and move on our supplier and all that. But that’s all it means.

Emily Gable 1:42:12
And you’re never going to make that mistake again.

Bill Gasiamis 1:42:14
Well, I don’t think so, because now we’re going to implement a solution, and the solution is to have my business partner have access to see what I see when I’m quoting and when I’m at the site, he’s already seen all of that stuff, and I’m not delivering it to him, to him for the first time, because I’m the quote guy. He’s the on on the tools guy.

The Importance of Self-Care and Mindfulness

Bill Gasiamis 1:42:39
I’m not delivering it to him the first time, and he’s taking my word for it, because I haven’t made that type of mistake before, yeah, whereas now I have to have a a measure in between us, because I can’t he can’t trust me either. I’ve told him not to, to question something that doesn’t sound right, because he just took my word for it. So we’ve learned a lot from it. And that’s another thing, another lesson that came from it, and growth and opportunity there, but being hard on myself, I really, for the first time in a long time, had to say, be kind to yourself.

Emily Gable 1:43:15
Yeah, yeah. I think that’s the biggest lesson. I really do think the biggest lesson from stroke overall, from the all of the experience, was I have to be kind to myself. You know, when I have clients on my table and there’s so much negative self talk I hear coming out of their mouth, I’m like, I It’s hard for me not to just say, like, please be nice.

Emily Gable 1:43:46
I do say I’m like, You have nicer words for yourself than that, you know? And my dad had things that he’d say that were like little nuggets. And he would say, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. And I’m not perfect in saying nice things to myself all the time, but I catch myself a lot, and then I’m like, Oh, I’m not. I’m just not even going to say anything out loud. Like, I’m not going to even have that thought.

Bill Gasiamis 1:44:14
It applies to other people. You wouldn’t treat your worst enemy like your your friend like that. If you don’t have anything nice to say about someone, don’t say anything at all. Well, that lesson is applicable to us as well about ourselves, our own self talk, and sometimes we forget to apply those nuggets to us, and we just apply to people, and we make it all about others, and we forget about what we do.

Bill Gasiamis 1:44:43
You know, we make ourselves feel bad and all that kind of stuff, and then we change our own neurochemistry, and we change our own emotional health and well being, and we’re responsible for that. We’re the only ones Yeah, to step up. Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great lesson to learn. You know, I really appreciate you reaching out and joining me on the podcast again. It is great to catch up with you again and to share the the journey of somebody who is 17 years post stroke and has been through turmoil and come out the other side.

Bill Gasiamis 1:45:21
And I think a lot of stroke survivors are probably doing the right thing, just focusing on now, how to get through now. And once you come to the other side of that, you’re a great example for how you can how how you continue to live and grow, overcome, learn, discover, change Your Life, endure the tough times, the challenges and it’s also really good for me to see that, because I’m not 17 years post. I’m just a little bit before that I’m about 13.

Emily Gable 1:46:15
And I want, I just want to share one thing. I had someone reach out to me over Instagram because they heard my interview with you on recovery after stroke, because his wife had had a stroke while she was delivering. I can’t remember the details, and it was, I think it was a couple years ago, but he was reach. It was the husband was reaching out to me of like, I could tell in a panic and had found your resource, and found that my episode of, like, pregnant and stroke, and I just suggested, like, get as much support around you.

Emily Gable 1:46:55
Like, take care of yourself as the caregiver. And obviously your wife needs, like, all the support that she can get, but you also need the support, and that was my advice for him, was to, as the caregiver, make sure that you’re not forgetting about yourself. And also, you know, obviously she needs, she needs that support around her.

Bill Gasiamis 1:47:19
She should have the hospital team, you know, doing their thing to an extent, but there’s no point having a sick caregiver, because they’ve neglected themselves and put themselves into caring and looking after and doing everything for the person who’s unwell. Two people unwell at the same time is a disaster.

Emily Gable 1:47:42
So I hope that all the people in that situation are doing better, and I’d imagine it’s hopefully behind them at this point. I can’t remember how when that was, it was in the past two years, probably.

Bill Gasiamis 1:47:57
I have in the past two years as well. And you know, people reach out and give me credit, but the reality is is the people who reach out and give me credit wouldn’t be in a position to do so if they hadn’t, if this podcast wasn’t a compilation of two people coming together to do an interview and talk about stroke and then grow, grow Google’s what Google thinks about whether we should send this information to people searching for stroke resources.

Bill Gasiamis 1:48:33
So I had a lady reach out and say that because of one of my interviews, she avoided having a full blown stroke because she had a carotid artery dissection, and when she typed the symptoms into Google, somehow my episode came up and she listened to it.

Emily Gable 1:48:51
Wow, that’s amazing.

Bill Gasiamis 1:48:53
Husband was about to fly interstate for work. I think he’s in the army in the United States. Uh, huh, um. She told him, Do not, you can’t go. I’ve there’s something wrong with my neck. I think I’m going to have a stroke. He took her to the hospital, and basically she went to the hospital and said, I have a carotid artery dissection. You guys need to scan my neck. And they scanned her neck. They found the carotid artery dissection. They put in a stent and avoided her having a full blown stroke.

Emily Gable 1:49:31
That’s amazing. That’s really awesome.

Technology and Tools in Recovery

Bill Gasiamis 1:49:33
Yeah, and I’m happy to receive the credit, but credit is also to the rest of the people who have joined me on the podcast, because together, we’ve all created and everyone has contacted me and said, I want to share my story. It’s time to share my story. It’s partly about them, but it’s also partly about helping other stroke survivors. So weird that people are going through stroke and. Already thinking about other stroke survivors that they want to help. It’s weird in a lovely way, like it’s amazing.

Bill Gasiamis 1:50:08
And that’s the thing I know. I re I receive emails. I love being a connector, because I can’t support all these people. I don’t know what it’s like they have a stroke during pregnancy. So it’s brilliant that people are reaching out and going, can we connect to that person.

Bill Gasiamis 1:50:27
I’ve not met a single stroke survivor who I’ve interviewed, who has had a request for a connection that has said, No, I’m not interested I don’t want to talk to that person. Just bring it, I love that we have this community now. I need it. I made a kind of a pact to 1000 episodes to myself. Go for 1000 and unfortunately, there’s not going to be a lack of candidates to join me.

Emily Gable 1:50:54
Yeah, and every stroke is so different. So it’s like, there’s like, different flavors, you know.

Bill Gasiamis 1:51:00
So many ways to get to stroke as well. You hear about ischemic stroke, and you hear about hemorrhagic stroke. Well, the the ways to have an ischemic stroke are endless, and the ways to get to a hemorrhagic stroke are just as endless, like seems to be just as endless, and I was missing this. This is what I was missing when I was going through it early on.

Bill Gasiamis 1:51:26
Trying to have this conversation with my wife, every day for the last 13 years, she would have lost the marbles. This guy won’t shut up about this. Just stop Yeah, and I wouldn’t believe her either. So this is my therapy amongst other things. And I’m just, that’s another thing I’m grateful for. You know, just it’s one of those sliding door moments.

Bill Gasiamis 1:51:53
It’s one of those, what else can we do with this? What? Where else opportunity? So I say that so that the people listening to us can go, maybe I’m going to do, take Emily’s approach, and I’m going to do one of the things that Emily suggested, and I’m going to think about things in one of the ways that Bill suggested. And if that happens from these episodes, then we’ve changed the course of history for that person in a positive way.And that’s it job done. It was worth it.

Emily Gable 1:52:31
Thank you.

Bill Gasiamis 1:52:32
Thank you for joining me. I really appreciate it.

Emily Gable 1:52:35
Yeah. This is great.

Bill Gasiamis 1:52:39
Well before we finish a quick thank you to Banksia Tech for supporting this episode and making tools like the Syrebo Hanson Rehab Glove available and more accessible to stroke survivors if you’re working to improve hand function, whether it’s early days or years into your recovery, This glove was made to support you with six therapy modes, including a patented Mirror mirror function.

Bill Gasiamis 1:53:06
It’s built for progress at home without needing a clinic. It’s also available as low-cost assistive technology and international orders are welcome through the Banksia tech website. Head to Banksiatech.com.au, or use the links in the show notes and YouTube description. Now back to the conversation we just had 17 years after her stroke during pregnancy, Emily isn’t back to normal.

Bill Gasiamis 1:53:33
She’s something far more powerful, self aware, intentional and still growing. She’s navigated motherhood with deficits, found her way into facial work and healing arts, and created space for her body to become a teacher and not just a battleground. If you’re still waking up with fatigue, still figuring out how to trust your body or still searching for who you are, now, let this be your reminder. Healing isn’t a finish line, it’s a lifelong relationship with yourself. We’ll catch you in the next one.

Intro 1:54:08
Importantly, we present many podcasts designed to give you an insight and understanding into the experiences of other individuals. Opinions and treatment protocols discussed during any podcast are the individual’s own experience, and we do not necessarily share the same opinion, nor do we recommend any treatment protocol discussed.

Intro 1:54:25
All content on this website and any linked blog, podcast or video material controlled this website or content is created and produced for informational purposes only and is largely based on the personal experience of Bill Gasiamis. The content is intended to complement your medical treatment and support healing.

Intro 1:54:41
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Intro 1:55:00
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Intro 1:55:16
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Intro 1:55:40
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