Stroke Effects: What a Hemorrhagic Stroke Did to Jake

Stroke effects aren’t always obvious. Some show up immediately. Others arrive quietly, long after the hospital discharge papers are signed. For Jake, the stroke effects didn’t end when his life was saved; they began there.

Four months after a hemorrhagic stroke, Jake can walk, talk, think clearly, and hold a conversation that’s thoughtful, articulate, and reflective. To someone passing him in the street, he might look “lucky.” But stroke effects don’t ask for permission to be visible. They live beneath the surface, shaping movement, sensation, pain, identity, and recovery in ways few people prepare you for.

This is what stroke did to Jake.

The Stroke Effects That Came Without Warning

Before his stroke, Jake’s life was full and demanding. A husband. A father of four. An administrator coordinating drivers and operations. Active. Fit. Always moving toward the next opportunity.

But in hindsight, the stroke effects were quietly signaling their arrival.

Jake experienced severe headaches with a rapid onset. Nausea. Vomiting. Visual disturbances. At the time, they were dismissed as migraines. His blood pressure had been flagged as “pre-high” years earlier while living overseas, but after returning to Canada, he found himself without a regular doctor in an overloaded medical system.

These were early stroke effects masquerading as manageable inconveniences.

When the hemorrhagic stroke finally hit, it did so decisively, affecting the right side of his body, disrupting speech, movement, sensation, and cognition all at once.

What Stroke Did to His Body

One of the most misunderstood stroke effects is how specific and strange the deficits can be.

Jake didn’t just “lose strength.” He lost motor planning.

When he tried to write the letter T, his brain sent the wrong instruction. Instead of a straight downward line, his hand looped as if writing an L. The muscles worked. The intention was there. The signal was wrong.

To retrain that connection, he didn’t practice ten times.

He practiced thousands.

This is one of the realities of stroke effects: recovery isn’t about effort alone, it’s about repetition at a scale most rehab programs don’t explain clearly enough.

Post-Stroke Pain: The Stroke Effect No One Warns You About

If there’s one stroke effect that dominates Jake’s day-to-day experience, it’s pain.

Not soreness.

Not discomfort.

Neuropathic pain.

Jake describes it as:

• Burning sensations
• Tingling
• Tightness, like plastic strapping wrapped around his limbs
• At its worst, a “12 out of 10” pain, like being tased while his hand is on fire

This kind of post-stroke pain often resets overnight. One morning, he wakes up and feels almost normal. The next, the pain returns without warning, severe enough to stop him in his tracks.

This is a stroke effect that confuses survivors and clinicians alike because it doesn’t follow logic, effort, or consistency. It simply exists.

And for many survivors, it’s one of the hardest stroke effects to live with.

The Non-Linear Reality of Stroke Effects

Stroke recovery doesn’t move forward in a straight line. Jake learned this quickly.

One week brings noticeable gains.

The next feels like a regression.

Then progress returns quietly, unexpectedly.

This non-linear pattern is itself a stroke effect.

Early on, these fluctuations feel frightening. Survivors worry they’re “going backwards.” But over time, patterns emerge. Rest days aren’t failures. They’re part of recovery. Silent healing days matter just as much as active ones.

Understanding this changed how Jake viewed his recovery and how he measured progress.

Identity Loss: An Overlooked Stroke Effect

Some stroke effects don’t show up on scans.

Jake wasn’t defined by his job, but work still mattered. Structure mattered. Contribution mattered. After the stroke, uncertainty crept in.

Would he return to the same role?

Could he handle the same responsibility?

Should he?

Stroke effects often force people to renegotiate identity, not because they want to, but because they must. The question shifts from “What do I do?” to “Who am I now?”

For many survivors, this is one of the most emotionally demanding stroke effects of all.

Recovery Begins With Action, Not Permission

While hospitalized, Jake made a decision.

He wouldn’t wait passively.

He brought in notebooks. Pencils. Hand grippers. Hair clippers. He practiced shaving, writing, and gripping, no matter how long it took. If writing the alphabet took all day, that was the day’s work.

By discharge, his writing had moved from scribbles to cursive.

This wasn’t luck.

It was intentional engagement with stroke effects, meeting them head-on instead of avoiding them.

What Stroke Effects Teach Us

Jake’s experience reveals something important:

Stroke effects are not just medical outcomes.

They are lived realities.

They affect:

• How your body moves
• How pain shows up
• How progress feels
• How identity shifts
• How hope is tested

And yet, understanding stroke effects, naming them, and normalizing them can reduce fear and isolation.

That’s why conversations like this matter.

You’re Not Alone With These Stroke Effects

If you’re early in recovery, you might recognize yourself in Jake’s story.

If you’re years in, you might recognize where you’ve been.

Either way, stroke effects don’t mean the end of progress. They mean the beginning of a different kind of journey, one that rewards patience, repetition, and perspective.

If you want to go deeper into recovery insights, lived experience, and hope-driven guidance:

• Learn more about the book here: The Unexpected Way That a Stroke Became the Best Thing That Happened
• Support the podcast and community here: Recovery After Stroke Patreon

Final Thought

Stroke effects don’t define who you are, but they do shape how you recover. Jake’s story reminds us that recovery isn’t about returning to who you were. It’s about learning how to live fully with what remains and discovering what’s still possible.

Disclaimer:

This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan.

Living With Stroke Effects You Can’t Always See

Jake reveals the stroke effects that remained after the hospital—pain, motor issues, fatigue, and how he’s navigating recovery four months on.

Highlights:

00:00 Introduction and Background
05:10 Health Awareness and Signs
16:56 Personal Health Journey and Challenges
23:11 Recovery Process and Emotional Impact
38:28 Attitude Towards Recovery
46:30 Long-Term Recovery and Reflection
55:06 Work and Identity Post-Stroke
01:07:40 Pain Management and Coping Strategies
01:16:16 Community and Shared Experiences

Transcript:

Introduction and Background

Bill Gasiamis (00:00)
Today’s episode is one that really stayed with me long after we finished recording. You’re going to meet Jake, a stroke survivor who is very early in recovery and navigating the reality of what stroke actually does to a person long after the emergency has

What makes this conversation so powerful isn’t just the hemorrhagic stroke Jake experienced. It’s how openly he talks about the stroke effects that followed. The pain, the confusion.

the nonlinear recovery and the parts of stroke that are hard to explain unless you’ve lived them.

I won’t give away Jake’s story that’s his to tell, but I will say this. If you’re early in recovery or you’re trying to make sense of symptoms that don’t quite fit the brochures or discharge notes, there’s a good chance you’ll hear something in Jake’s experience that feels confronting and reassuring at the same time.

Now, before we get into the conversation, want to pause for a moment and say this, everything you hear, the interviews, the hosting, the editing exists because listeners like you help keep this podcast going.

When you visit patreon.com slash recovery after stroke, you’re supporting my goal of recording a thousand episodes. So no stroke survivor has to ever feel like they’re navigating this

if you’re looking for something you can lean on throughout your recovery or while supporting someone you love my book, the unexpected way that a stroke became the best thing that happened is available at recovery after stroke.com slash book.

It’s the resource I wished I’d had when I was confused, overwhelmed and trying to understand what stroke had done to my life.

all right. Now let’s get into the conversation with Jake.

Bill (01:40)
Jake Bordeaux, welcome to the podcast.

Jake (01:42)
Hi Bill, how are you this evening?

Bill (01:44)
I’m very well my friend. It is morning here. Just gone past 9am. We had a late night last night. We went to the opera and we saw Carmen.

Jake (01:57)
Hmm. How’s that?

Bill (01:59)
And for those who haven’t seen it, it’s in French and you have to read the subtitles because it has subtitles. I couldn’t read them because I was just a little too far. So I was squinting the whole night. But it’s a great opera, it was a great show, but we got home late so I’m quite tired.

Jake (02:20)
I couldn’t imagine that. Luckily I do speak French. So I wouldn’t need the subtitles, but that’s something I was afraid of actually, you know, coming out of the stroke is I was afraid almost that I had forgotten how to speak French or that I’d forgotten how to speak both languages. But luckily I speak ⁓ English and French.

Bill (02:40)
With a name like Bordeaux, I would definitely expect you to at least have some idea of French.

Jake (02:45)
Yes, indeed, sir. Half English and half French. I’ve been using that largely to my advantage. I’d been working up here in Northern Ontario with Federal Express. So I was working in administration here and sort of coordinating the management and the drivers being the liaison during the two during the day. so, you know, anytime the drivers might have equipment that needs any kind of repair or any kind of issues they might

come up with on road as well as when they leave the station and when they come back into the station, I’m the guy that they would deal with.

Bill (03:22)
Wow, that’s cool. So tell me what was life like before stroke for you? What were you up to? What kind of things did you do? How did you spend your time?

Jake (03:33)
Well, life has had a lot of ups and downs for me in the last year’s bill. So, ⁓ I had been living for many years in, in Hong Kong and I’m originally from Canada and, I was born in the seventies, born in Ontario here. And by 2009, I had had various, you know, done grit, various career, choices or opportunities, job opportunities here. And I decided to.

try my hand at a little something overseas. ⁓ I had an opportunity with a fellow Canadian named Noah Fuller who brought me over wanting to show me how to get into the watch business. And being two ⁓ enthusiasts, you know, being, ⁓ you know, I’d say we were into watch modification, watch restoration, and we were wanting to get a little bit more into building custom parts and building out custom watches.

⁓ working with various ⁓ people, military groups, et cetera, at working on their watch project. So he asked me to come to Hong Kong, learn everything that he knew about the business, and hopefully show me what I was gonna get into over there. That worked out, and while I was over there, I met my wife, I love my wife, I’m still with her.

Stroke Effects: Health Awareness and Signs

I got together with my wife in 2009 when I had first arrived in Hong Kong and I got married to her in 2010. During that time, Noah unfortunately passed away, so I lost my business partner, but the business continued to grow. So over the years, the business grew with my wife and I running that on our own. ⁓

Unfortunately, maybe it got some of the attention on the world stage. There’s been a lot of political, we’ll say issues in Hong Kong and leading into the pandemic, business was already suffering. ⁓ Once the pandemic hit and Hong Kong was locked down for a ⁓ big chunk of time.

that really affected our business and took it down. By the time the pandemic had played its way out, our life over there was looking like it wasn’t panning out the way we’d wanted it to. And a lot of the opportunities that had been unfolding for us all of a sudden came to a close. ⁓ So we moved back to Canada.

about two years ago and I started working up here and thinking about our next business opportunity. I’m a lot like you and I’m never really satisfied with what I’m doing and I kind of want to reach for the next thing and I kind of want to reach for more. So I like to work a lot. So while I was working on getting the next thing started, I was working with Federal Express.

My days would be really, really busy. I would get up quite early in the morning and I’d chop wood here. I have a dog that I like to walk. I have a golden retriever. I have four children. So I have three girls and a boy and they’re ranging from four years old to 14 years old. They’re all in school.

And of course, I was working full time at Federal Express and ⁓ working towards the next thing. So I guess life was pretty active.

Bill (07:27)
Pretty helpful. Did you have any sense that, you know, with regards to your health, things might take a turn? Was there any information coming to you that you might see now kind of in hindsight and go, well, that was probably a sign.

Jake (07:45)
Yeah, Bill. So I’ve watched a lot of your podcasts and I found them particularly helpful, especially a lot of the ones relating to hemorrhagic stroke. ⁓ Reason being that’s what happened to me. So ⁓ I had a hemorrhagic stroke ⁓ and it took out a large part of ⁓ my capabilities, I guess, mobility on my right side.

So a lot of my body that’s affected is my right side. ⁓ Now, when I got back here from Hong Kong to Canada, unfortunately, I came here to a little bit of an overloaded medical system, to say the least. So I’m hoping that maybe some of what we’re talking today might help people who are in Canada if they suffer the ⁓ same thing as I did to try and get them on track for us, get them back into recovery. ⁓

When I arrived here, the system was overloaded. I didn’t have a doctor. So unfortunately, while I had been warned for several years that I had pre high blood pressure and ⁓ the doctors in Hong Kong had been, you know, monitoring my blood pressure and keeping a pretty close eye on things after arriving here in Canada, that wasn’t a case. And so

you know, it would look now that I think about it, that I was having some warning signs. I was having headaches and I’d say that some of those headaches were pretty severe. ⁓ The headaches would come on like a, like a very fast, ⁓ fast onset headache. I would get very nauseated very quickly. ⁓ And then sort of, would, I’d vomit the headache.

would pass. At first, I thought I was getting migraine headaches. I’d had one when I was a lot younger. But ⁓ these were coming with some visual disturbance. I was having this horrible headache. was having nausea. So all the things you might expect from a migraine, except that it was going away within minutes and all of a sudden I was back at work. you know, in hindsight,

that definitely was ⁓ a warning flashes. And ⁓ had I had a proper physician, if I had somebody watching out for me, they may have caught that. I don’t know, there’s no way for us to know that. So what I would say is, if anybody’s having pretty high blood pressure, keep an eye on that. I would say my blood pressure when I had the stroke was quite high.

And if I had been monitoring that, I might’ve been on top of it. So would you like to hear about the day that it happened or?

Bill (10:45)
Yeah, I would in a moment. So with the blood pressure in Hong Kong, were you being monitored and also medicated or was it just you were being monitored?

Bill Gasiamis (10:56)
We’ll get back to Jake’s story in just a moment.

I want to pause for a second and ask you something important. Why do you listen to this podcast?

For many people, it’s because they finally hear someone who understands what they’re going through or because they learn something that helps them make sense of their own stroke effects without feeling overwhelmed or alone.

And here’s the part most listeners never really think

podcast only exists because people like you help keep it

There’s no big company behind it. No medical organization funding the work.

It’s just me, a fellow stroke survivor doing everything I can to make sure these conversations are available for the next person who wakes up after a stroke and doesn’t know what comes

One of the biggest challenges after stroke is finding reliable information without spending years searching, reading and second guessing yourself.

That’s why I want to mention turn2.ai.

Turn2 isn’t a sponsor, it’s a tool I personally use. If you choose to sign up using my affiliate link, you’ll get 10 % off and I’ll receive a small commission and no extra cost to you. That commission helps support the podcast and keep these conversations free.

What Turn2 does is simple but powerful. It saves you time. Instead of spending years trying to track down research, discussions and updates about stroke, Turn2 brings relevant information straight to you.

If you’re already dealing with fatigue, pain or cognitive overload, saving time and mental energy matters.

And if you want to go deeper on your recovery journey, you can also grab my book, The Unexpected Way That a Stroke Became the Best Thing That Happened at recoveryafterstroke.com slash book.

If this podcast has helped you feel understood even once, consider supporting the mission in whatever way feels right for you.

All right, let’s get back to Jake.

Jake (12:46)
No, so I wasn’t being medicated for high blood pressure at all. was kind of these, well, it’s not quite severe enough to really do anything about it, so we’ll just keep an eye on it. ⁓ I did have pre-existing ⁓ medical issues. When I was quite a lot younger, I had suffered from ⁓ what some people might call Crohn’s disease or an inflammatory bowel issue.

and I had some back pain. But other than that, I wasn’t really on any other types of medications. I wasn’t on any kinds of blood pressure medications, any kind of heart medications. ⁓ I wasn’t on any kind of antidepressants or anything like that. ⁓ I would say that I was pretty much feeling like I was in fairly good shape.

haven’t gained or lost a heck of a lot of weight since the stroke. So what you see is what you get. wasn’t overweight. I wasn’t eating a lot of junk. I don’t smoke cigarettes. So.

Bill (13:56)
Yeah. One of those things. I know what you mean. Like I’ve been diagnosed with high blood pressure in the last six months and headaches. Jake, I’ve had headaches for years. I’m talking maybe four or five years. And at the beginning, they were intermittent. They would come and go similar to what you mentioned. And I would be able to get through the day. And I thought they were migraines, although nobody really convinced me that they were migraines. I couldn’t really say.

That sounds familiar if I look up what migraine is and all the people who I’ve ever asked about a migraine, it never sounded like, I was never convinced by it. And then a little while ago, was at home, excuse me, I was at home with my wife, feeling really unwell. Did my, checked my blood pressure and it was about 170 over 110, 120, somewhere there. And that was, I knew that’s way too high, know, previously.

I’ve checked my blood pressure maybe on the on perfect day and it was 120 over 80. So for me that was pretty serious. We went to the hospital because of all my history and they said your blood pressure is high. It’s probably a migraine causing you to have a migraine which is then causing your blood pressure to go high rather than the other way around. They didn’t say it’s high blood pressure is causing the migraine and or the headache.

And then they put me on some migraine medication and they said, if we give you this migraine medication, it’s going to knock you out. You’re going to sleep, but you should wake up without a headache. Well, I woke up with a headache. The migraine medication didn’t do anything. So within a couple of weeks of that particular hospitalization and then going to my general practitioner, he prescribed me a blood pressure medication, came to start on it’s called to help keep the blood pressure down.

Now I’m trying to get to the bottom of why do I have high blood pressure? That’s the part that’s frustrating me, because no one can tell you why you have high blood pressure unless they check your arteries and they’re half clogged or you’ve got some other issues with your heart or something like that. And I don’t have any of those issues. So now ⁓ it’s one of those things. It’s kind of like, well,

you have high blood pressure. It might be something that runs in your family. When I check with my dad, my dad says that he has high blood pressure. My dad’s 84. So it’s like, you know, and he says, I started taking blood pressure medication at around 50, which is my age. But that’s still, that’s not good enough for me. Like I’m still not comfortable with, well, your dad did. So you are, and then therefore,

just move on with life, take this tablet and then move on. Now I’m happy to take the tablet because I do not want to have another hemorrhagic stroke. I’m very comfortable taking a tablet to prevent that, right? No trauma, no traumas.

Personal Health Journey, Stroke Effects, and Challenges

But ⁓ it’s a very interesting place to find myself in after going through all the three brain hemorrhages that I’ve already had since 2012, brain surgery, learning how to walk again. Now I’ve had enough. I don’t want…

I don’t want to be doing this anymore, even though I am finding myself here and I’m tackling it. Part of me is going, man, this is too much. Why do we need to go through this now?

Jake (17:29)
Yeah, I wanted to ask you something actually, maybe if you’ve had the same, you brought something back to mind here, is that one thing I did have, again, in hindsight, I had visual disturbance. in 2018, my grandmother, bless her shit, my grandmother passed away and I was abroad and I took it pretty hard. was largely raised by my grandfather, my grandmother.

And I took it, it was very emotional. And ⁓ when I was grieving, I had an episode where I had a rather bad headache. And again, I had one of these feelings, like I thought I had a migraine headache. Maybe I did, or maybe we’re reading something into it. But coming out of that, I had a visual problem.

And it was one of my eyes. in my right eye, you know, again, I have my issues now with my right hand side. My right eye had gotten quite blurry. I was having ⁓ issues with my vision in my right eye. And ⁓ a doctor had decided that, well, maybe it’s a form of macular degeneration. And he decided to do a laser surgery.

at the time in Hong Kong. However, it didn’t have any effect. It didn’t help me out at all. And the only thing that helped that was time. And I wonder again now if the reason why treating the eye didn’t take any effect is because he should have been treating or looking at the brain. I think that maybe the issue might have been a small stroke to begin with.

and I didn’t realize it at the time.

Bill (19:25)
That sounds very plausible, right? That’s I think probably a very logical conclusion to get to. Sometimes, you you hear people lose their vision and the way they discovered they’ve had a stroke is they’ll go to the ophthalmologist and they’ll say, I can’t see. And the guy will go, well, your eye looks perfect. I there’s nothing wrong with your lens. There’s nothing wrong with the macula. The eye pressure is fine. Everything’s fine. And that definitely suggests

that there is a ⁓ neurological issue of some kind, right? So it’s like, next step is go to the hospital, get it checked out. But ⁓ yeah, well, there’ll be no way of knowing, but I science, I had similar kind of things happen about a year and a half before my first bleed. was at our local football here, which ⁓ my team made the

what we call the grand final. There’s usually a playoff series and then the last two teams get to the final game of the year and then the one that wins wins the championship. And my team made it and I was there cheering them on, screaming my head off, you know, just being a really passionate supporter and went home that weekend with a massive headache that lasted about five days and ended up in hospital. They did a lumbar puncture. They checked for

a brain hemorrhage or anything along those lines and they didn’t find anything and they also didn’t find the faulty blood vessel that later would cause the first brain hemorrhage. But when I speak to people about it, everyone will say, well, we’ll never know, Bill. There’s no way of knowing whether they were linked. But in my mind, it’s pretty logical to conclude that that first massive five day headache was

a sign that something wasn’t right in my brain. And although they had that suspicion of that, they didn’t know what they were looking for. So they couldn’t find the faulty blood vessel. just did a scan, a CT, sorry. Yeah, they just did a CT to actually see if there was any visible signs of a tumor or a bleed or something like that. And since there wasn’t, they weren’t able to diagnose the faulty blood vessel that would later.

⁓ bleed three times.

Jake (21:55)
That’s incredible, by the way, the three times thing, and that’s got to take a lot of strength to get through. ⁓ I don’t know if I had mentioned to you, how recent this has been. So ⁓ one thing that I’ve noticed with your podcast is that most of the guests who are on have had a considerable amount of time elapse in between when the event has taken place and when they’ve been able to get

back lot of their capabilities, a lot of their abilities. So how long exactly did it take you to get back to the stage or the state that you’re in now?

Bill (22:36)
I would say that I had, ⁓ well, the first three years were tumultuous because every time I was on the road to recovery after the first bleed, then the second bleed happened, that was six weeks apart. And then after the second bleed, I was really unwell. ⁓ Memory issues, couldn’t type an email, couldn’t read, couldn’t drive, couldn’t work.

Recovery Process and Emotional Impact

angry, really angry. I was probably in that state for the best part of about six to nine months. And then it started to ease and settle down as the blood vessel stopped bleeding. And then the, and then the blood in my head started to dissipate and kind of dissolved, I suppose. And I think I thought everything was going fine. So between February, 2012 and November, 2014, that’s when I had the next bleed November, 2014.

the third one. And then when I woke up from that, I had to learn how to walk again. So by the time I got to February 2015, I had been three years in you know, in the dungeon, you know, getting just smashed around by stroke again and again and again, and then brain surgery, then learning how to walk again. And I think personally, I turned the tide maybe

at around 2018, 2019. So it took another three to four years for me to feel like even though I’m living with all these deficits, I have got enough of my cognitive function back, my physical function back to be able to go back to my painting company, which had been on pause for a number of years. yeah, so all up, you know, from first bleed,

Jake (24:25)
incredible.

Bill (24:30)
to back to the painting company, you know, it seven years. It was quite a long time. And I hear people have similar kind of stories about five, six, seven years. They’re still dealing with everything that the stroke caused, but they have some kind of a turn, like for the better, some kind of like a shift in whether it’s mindset, whether it’s emotionally or whether it’s physically, they have kind of some.

Like a fork in the road moment where things change for the better.

Jake (25:03)
That’s incredibly inspiring for me. So yeah, you give me a lot of hope because I’ve been going through a lot and I’ve only been at this for four months now. so I had this stroke in late July and upon getting into the hospital, again, I wasn’t able to talk.

I wasn’t able to use my, couldn’t move my right hand side at all. ⁓ I wasn’t able to go to the washroom, any of the things. I was basically left with kind of like ⁓ a blank slate and everything that I’ve gotten back has been pretty rapid. So I’m really extremely thankful for that, especially that, given that hemorrhagic strokes are rare, ⁓

consequences seem to be more severe and more often fatal. So, yeah, I’ve only been at this for a few months,

Bill (26:10)
Yeah, I was gonna ask what was it what happened on the day of the strike? What was it like?

Jake (26:16)
Yeah, so on the day of the stroke, let me get back there for just a second. Right, so on the day of, it was a pretty regular day and I had got up, it was a beautiful day, it was July. ⁓ My family had been on a trip recently, they’d gone to the nation’s capital and visited my family and I was happy to have them back.

I just bought my wife a new bike and ⁓ I tuned it up. The dog had been out and I was starting work at 2 p.m. So I was about to go in for 2 p.m. and see the drivers for the whole second part of their day until the closing. ⁓ And I ⁓ was biking into work. again, I was incredibly active. ⁓ So I was biking to work and it would be

generally about a 15 minute bike ride and it’s a lot of uphill, et cetera. And some of the route is through some residential areas and even some pathways that go through the woods. Again, I live in Canada and in particular in Northern Ontario in quite a small town named Kirkland called Kirkland Lake, which is a gold mining town. we’re in a gold mining boom right now.

And so yeah, I was biking to work, feeling pretty good. ⁓ When I got to work, or when I was just getting to work, I was pretty close to being late ⁓ after messing around with the kids a little bit. And so I pushed myself a little bit harder than I usually do. ⁓ I got to work right on time. I got in a little bit winded.

And I started getting my equipment together, got all of my equipment and headed to my office and headed to the window where I’d be greeting all of the drivers as they come into the station. And I started to feel a little bit dizzy. So my thinking was though, I probably just pushed it a little too hard and I probably should have had a drink of water. So I grabbed a drink of water.

And ⁓ I sat back down at my desk and the first drivers started to come in. And as they started to come in, I started to feel like it was hard ⁓ to keep track of what they were saying. I was having a hard time concentrating and that’s really not like me. Usually I’m able to concentrate on four children, a wife, a pet, myself. And when I’m at work, I’m able to deal with the whole station full of

FedEx workers, drivers, et cetera. So I started asking the drivers, can you just leave your things with me? I’m going to put them aside for a few minutes until I’m back in the game here. I think I’ve winded myself a bit. I’m just going to chill. And the equipment started to pile up, because it was one driver, two drivers.

three drivers. And as this was starting to go on, I was looking over at a lady who was working next to me in the office. ⁓ And ⁓ I’m very lucky that she was there. And ⁓ I’ll let you know why in a second. But ⁓ I started to look at her and I started to look at the drivers. And I think at that point, she looked at me and ⁓ it struck her there’s something really not right with Jake.

So she came over and started to ask me some questions and she started to try and direct the drivers away from me so that maybe they’d stop asking questions. And it became pretty apparent to her real quick ⁓ that I was having a stroke. Now, thankfully, this lady’s not usually sitting in the office next to me. It was one of those things where she just happened to be there this day and she happens to work with the fire brigade here.

and she works with first responders and she’s incredibly well educated as far as first aid and strokes and heart attacks, et cetera. So she was able to recognize what was going on with me right away. ⁓ She had management and she had everybody ⁓ take a look at me and they had the first responders coming right away. The emergency crew showed up within minutes.

and they started asking me all the appropriate questions and they started lifting me out of there and driving me away. So I got to work, I guess, at about 2 p.m. That was when my shift started. And ⁓ by 2.25, ⁓ my wife was walking home from the neighborhood park with our kids and heard an ambulance.

go by here, not realizing it was me. I’d been taken off in the ambulance. They brought me to a nearby town and then they airlifted me to Sudbury, Ontario. I guess in our nearby town, they determined that yes, I was having a stroke. They did a very quick preliminary scan. They sent me to Sudbury, Ontario, where they started doing more scans and figured out exactly what was going on.

Although the medical system had failed me and I didn’t have a doctor going into it, when the rubber hit the road there, they had it together and they got me the appropriate help as fast as possible. That’s probably what helped me to get my recovery online so quick.

Bill (32:18)
definitely does the time that you take to get to hospital makes a massive difference. That was a good outcome considering everything that was going wrong at the time. So then how does the hospital stay go? How long are you in the hospital and how does it play out?

Jake (32:37)
Yeah, so I arrived in in the hospital in in Sudbury and I was there for for a few days so ⁓ yeah, I was there for a few days and in that time my My ⁓ my wife and ⁓ one of my good friends one of our children there They managed to come and see me and from what they say I was incoherent at the time So I guess I was still able to talk ⁓

but what was coming out of me was a lot of garbled nonsense. I’ve seen some of your guests say, I thought I was saying, can you please hand me my bag and I need you to bring, and all that was coming out was sort of, blah, blah, blah, blah, like it wasn’t making any sense at all. ⁓ So I was in there for days.

And once they had me stabilized in ⁓ Sudbury, Ontario, they decided to transfer me and I had my choice between a couple of different towns. So I would say that by the 25th, 24th, 25th, I was stabilized and I was heading to Sudbury on the 25th. ⁓ Once I arrived in Sudbury, I think I was visited, ⁓

by my folks and my wife and kids. And then I was sent to Timmins, Ontario for my actual recovery. So it was pretty fast. I had the stroke on the 21st and by the 26th, I was in Timmins where I’d spend the rest of my ⁓ recovery time.

Bill (34:27)
How did they deal with leaking blood vessel?

Jake (34:30)
⁓ They didn’t. So they had determined that they were going to probably do a surgery. When they were taking me into the hospital, they had told me that there was a ⁓ brain hemorrhage, ⁓ that it was leaking, that they were going to be monitoring it, that it would be likely there would be a surgery, and that I should probably be

be prepared not to make it through. ⁓ So I guess, you know, they gave me some hope. I mean, they told me that we can hope for the best, but they were quite honest with me at the time in saying you might be going for the rest of your life ⁓ wearing diapers or unable to talk. ⁓ And it’s quite probable that you might not make it out of this.

Uh, so they monitored it and they continued to bring me while I was in the Sudbury for scans and they continued to monitor the situation. Um, but they didn’t do any surgery. So, uh, I was put on medications to bring the blood pressure down, to keep the blood pressure down. And, uh, and I was placed on those while I was in, in hospital. And I continued to.

recover all the way through August. And by the end of August, I had come back home. ⁓ while I was in hospital, I was only visited twice because it was far away from, from my home. And, ⁓ I’m honestly, Bill, I’m glad. ⁓ I was really happy. I was able to see my, my, my wife and kids by phone, obviously, you know, the wonders of modern technology. ⁓

but I was left with a lot of time on my own to reflect and I was left with a lot of time on my own to get better. you know, one of the things I decided once I got to the hospital was I’m not going to spend any time in the lounge. I’m not going to spend any of the time with the other patients who are ⁓ in here, nothing against them or anything like that. But the very first thing I did,

was I started to try and find more information about what exactly happened to me and ⁓ what are my chances of getting better and what gives me the best chances. And what I came up with was I had better start working on my recovery immediately. yeah, so one of the very first things that I did is I got my notebook into me.

notebook, got pencils, I got a pencil sharpener, I got one of those, ⁓ you know, hand gripper ⁓ exercise, you know, for your hands. ⁓ And I got a razor blade, and I got my wife and kids to bring in a hair trimmer. And I decided that no matter how long it was going to take me to shave, I was going to do that on my own.

no matter how long I thought I’m in here, I don’t have anything else to do today. If it’s going to take me all day to cut my hair and shave my face, I’m going to do that. ⁓ If it takes me all day to do the, write the alphabet down, I’m going to get through that. And I went from again, ⁓ scribbles from just scribbles and barely being able to hold onto the pencil to, ⁓ by the time I left the hospital,

I was writing in perfect cursive.

Attitude Towards Recovery

Bill (38:22)
Yeah, that’s brilliant. I love that attitude. That attitude is probably ⁓ something that holds people in very, like creates a great outcomes for people, regardless of how much the stroke has affected them, regardless of how bad their deficits are, you know, regardless of what version of stroke they caught, they, they had to experience. And this is what I was doing when I was in rehab as well. So I did the same thing when I came back from hospital. So

My first stay, I came back and we were on the internet checking, you know, is a blade in the brain? What is all this stuff? What does it all mean? Trying to get some answers. The second time, ⁓ six weeks later, I was searching for what kind of food should I be eating? If I’ve had a stroke, what should I be avoiding, et cetera? That was pretty cool to find out and learn, wow, there is actually a protocol that you can ⁓ take that supports your brain health instead of one.

that doesn’t support your brain health. So that was pretty awesome. And then ⁓ in rehab, I was searching YouTube for videos about neuroplasticity. was searching videos for ⁓ anything that had to do with recovery of a neurological challenge, et cetera. And it was just way better than being ⁓ sort of worrying about my own situation and focusing on me like.

internalizing it, you know, I was externalizing it and becoming proactive and I found, ⁓ and I found some great meditations. So I’m lying there. I can’t walk. I’m very sleepy. I need to sleep most of the time because I’m exhausted from all of the rehab. I’ll put on a meditation and just let it do its thing in the background while I was healing, resting, you know, recuperating. ⁓ so I think that approach

just changes the way that your body responds as well because your body wants to step up to the plate. If you set an intention, we’re going through the healing process, this is the path that we’re gonna take, the body follows. If you go through the other part, if you take the different path and go, well, things are not going good for us, we’re doing it really tough, we’re feeling sorry for ourselves, we’re not gonna put any extra effort in.

the body’s going to go, no, I’m listening. I’ll do exactly what you want. And you get the results that, that your intention has set. Right. So I think that’s brilliant. The way that you went about that and not interacting with other people. kind of get that too, because it can bring you down. Like seeing other people doing it hard can bring you down. And also ⁓ sometimes other people’s attitudes can rub off as well. And they can bring you down if

They’re feeling bad about this situation and you don’t want to be around people who are going to ruin your vibe. Doesn’t matter who they are or where they are.

Jake (41:27)
Right. And one thing that where I think the hospitals and doctors and therapy where I think they really let us down is something that I believe it was on one of your podcasts and someone talking about neuroplasticity is that when we do something for therapy, we should be doing it thousands of times. We shouldn’t be doing it a few times.

I think where we’re let down is like, ⁓ for instance, I went for my physiotherapy today and I find it helpful and I definitely do go, I would recommend it to anybody. But we will do each of these exercises 10 times. Do this 10 times, do this 10 times, do this 10 times. But what we’re failing to see is that, you know,

To really make those connections, need to do things hundreds or thousands of times. ⁓ I have a, know, a, for instance, for you, you know, I mentioned the writing. So a place where I have an incredible block is, ⁓ I will go to try and begin something, particularly where I’m going to write something down and I’ll have the intention of writing one thing and something different will come. So,

I would try and begin a word with the letter T and instead of beginning by going up and then straight down and crossing my T, instead I’m doing a loop like it’s an L. So in order to, you know, retrain, sort of get that, get that connection made, to go and start doing words that begin with the letter T.

Bill (43:17)
I have

Jake (43:24)
and a lot of times, mean like thousands of times before I could sit down and write a letter T. if people are feeling like they’re not getting anywhere or it’s not coming along for them and they are doing the exercises, I would say don’t give up and do them more. Don’t give up and do them less, do them more.

Bill (43:33)
Wow.

Jake (43:53)
⁓ If you’re going to be doing something like walking, if you’re finding that difficult, then I think maybe if you walked around the block on Tuesday, go another 10 steps further and do that for the following week and always just keep adding to it because it does get better. And I don’t know about you, do you find Bill like

I know one of your recent guests mentioned that it was a challenge for him to deal with how non-linear the recovery is. And I think that only hearing that from other people allowed me to accept that. Because a lot of the time I’ll feel like I’m doing great and things are incredibly better. And then maybe I have a week where I’m doing in respects, I’m doing worse than I was when I was in hospital.

And I think that that’s really hard to deal with. you have that too, or did you find that? The non-linear kind of feeling? Yeah.

Bill (44:55)
Indeed, and then what happens four months, five months, six months, 10 months, is you start seeing the pattern and the pattern is, okay, I’ve made some inroads, okay, here’s the quiet time or the downtime coming and then you feel better about it because it’s not a big deal. You see the pattern and you notice it and it’s less frustrating because that’s actually, it appears as though you’re doing nothing to your head. Your head might be going, oh, I’m not doing anything.

Long-Term Recovery and Reflection

sitting on my butt, I’m not able to get through a day of physical exertion or anything like that. I must be going backwards. Well, in fact, your body’s just doing a different version of recovery and it looks different. It looks still and it looks silent and it looks fatigued, but it isn’t going backwards. It’s just a different phase and it needs all of it. You need to do that silent, still, quiet, fatigued resting one. And then you need to do the one which is

to whatever extent you can, full on, full out, doing too much, going too far, ⁓ over-exerting yourself. And they kind of, you can’t have one without the other. You have to have them both. And ⁓ if you understand that, then you don’t get anxious or upset about it or bothered about it. And you start playing the long game. You stop focusing on today, I didn’t have a lot of effort, but…

If I reflect on my last six months or nine months, there was maybe only seven days that I was really low or didn’t feel great. The rest were better days or I felt okay or whatever it was. if you start playing when you’re only four months out, it’s hard to play the long game. But when you get to a year or 12 months out, you look back and reflect, you can see that majority of what you were doing was getting.

outcomes that were favorable and therefore, you know, and therefore you can sort of be okay with the quiet days, rest, the rest of all those. I used to go to loud events, whether they were a concert, a family event, a party, wedding, whatever. If they were long drawn out days, I would have to plan for the next day to be completely a write off, nothing on the calendar.

No going anywhere, seeing anybody, doing anything so that I could rest properly and get my brain back online so that I could have a good day, the third day, you know? And that’s how we did it for many, many years. And I remember one time when the shift came, when I said to my wife, I am not doing anything tomorrow. You make sure that whatever you do, you do without me. You’re going to go and do your thing, but I’m not going to be involved.

And then waking up in the morning and going, hey, I feel fantastic. What are we doing today? And she’s like, I didn’t plan for you, but okay. ⁓ let’s get the ball rolling on something. So we did something minor, but it was more than nothing. And that was my, okay. My moment of things are shifting and I’m able to recover overnight with a good night’s sleep quicker than I was.

doing previously.

Jake (48:19)
That’s great. That’s great. Yeah. A lot of this, I really appreciate talking to you and I appreciate hearing your guests who have been at this a lot longer than I have. ⁓ I’m incredibly encouraged by how well I’ve done so far, but it’s also, there’s a lot of questions. ⁓ For instance, I’m in this stage where I don’t know, Bill, if I’m going to make it back to the same job

as I was doing before, don’t know whether it’s reasonable to think that. Right now I’m doing, you know, going through all the steps that I need to go through and doing all the evaluations that I need to do. ⁓ But I’m not sure what the outcome is going to be. And that’s a little bit hard because I’m, you know, like most people who are entrepreneurs or, you know, have large families, we like to have an element of control, you know, with things.

So it’s been hard to just sort of sit back here and not know what’s coming along. As far as work goes, I don’t know. Luckily, you know, I have a building here where I do own the building and I do have commercial space downstairs. So maybe I have the option to now use that space for myself. And ⁓ maybe I’ll have to be, maybe I’ll be forced to go back into.

entrepreneurship and open my own business. Maybe going back to work ⁓ is not the path for me. We’ll have to wait and see.

Bill (49:56)
It will emerge. You’ll get a sense of it. I had ⁓ three years where I worked for another organization and it was a completely different field and they were, the role was a very entry level administrative role. Very, we’re talking a role that would probably be replaced by AI now. ⁓ So we, I was doing that for three years and what was good about planning and trying to get back to that level of

effort and work was that it served a purpose. And part of the purpose was talking to people, traveling, ⁓ doing work on the computer. It was retraining me as I was getting comfortable with the role, getting used to traveling, getting back to being in loud environments, et cetera. So it was difficult, was tiresome, it was challenging, but it was…

kind of like its own therapy. And when it served its purpose after three years, I was done. I just said, okay, I’m out of here. going back to running my own business again. And I’ll be, I’ll do that as slowly or at my own pace in any other way that I can so that ⁓ I create the whole, all the rules around the amount of hours that I attend, the type of work that I take on.

You know, so if I was too tired to work the following week, I would just tell my clients I’m busy for a week and I can book you in two weeks down the road, you know. So that was what was good about going back to my business. And also what was good about going back to a job for somebody else because their expectations, you know, working for a corporation, the expectations are far lower than the ones that we put on ourselves when we’re working.

for ourselves. So I know some people think working for a corporation is really stressful and all that kind of stuff. And it probably is. No. But I mean, I was barely working six hours a day. Whereas working for myself six hours a day that the day’s just starting, you six hours. You haven’t even hit lunchtime yet. So it’s interesting to think about work and how ⁓

and how you can use it as a therapy.

Jake (52:23)
It is well, I mean the difference for me is that I was actually in that role that you’re explaining right now when I had the stroke so I I’d gone through a whole bunch of very difficult things in Hong Kong and upon coming back here to Canada, I was almost feeling like I I had a lot of stress going on and I had a lot of things that I needed to sort out and ⁓

there was a lot of things that we need to settle with the kids. There was all sorts of stuff that needed to be done. So the job that I was working was actually, it was already fulfilling that role that you explained. I was having that less responsibility. was going in for a specific amount of hours that they were letting me know. So that was exactly it. was an administration job, but

it was really not close to the amount of responsibility that I was used to having. ironically, now that this has happened to me, it might be the amount of control that I have over the amount of worked that might be an advantage after going to stroke. I’d be interested to see

or to hear more about ⁓ how people deal with the change that comes with the different type of work they might be forced into, forced out of, and how they deal with that. Because I think that a lot of people deal with, ⁓ they think of their employment or they deal with their life in this sort of way, like people often ask, especially in Asia.

What do you do? The first thing that people do if you’re in Hong Kong is they hand you a business card. They call it a name card there. And the very first thing that you do when you meet somebody before you even speak is you hand them the card and you each examine each other’s cards. So this idea of like, what I do is who I am. And I, and I think that when you have something like this happen to you often

what you do must change. when you’re identifying with what you do, you’re sort of declaring that as your title, who you are, I would imagine that’s pretty tough. Luckily, I wasn’t tied to Federal Express, thankfully.

Work and Identity Post-Stroke

Bill (55:00)
Yeah, I hear you. is, people will work as a lawyer for 20 years or 30 years, have a stroke, and then it’s like, well, who am I now? What am I now? And that’s the challenge with working and identifying as the work that you do. know, those days are gone in theory. You know, you don’t get named John lawyer anymore. You don’t get named John banker.

anymore, you you don’t get the your surname from the occupation that you do back in the day, you know, Baker, carpenter, plumber, you know, all those people, they were their entire job, they did it for 3040 5060 years, that was what they did. And then when they couldn’t work anymore, well, they still identified as john plumber, because they had the name, the name was

given to them or John Carpenter or whomever. The thing about it is now with jobs being so ⁓ not long term anymore, you get a job or you go to a particular employer and then two, three years you’re in another role or another title, et cetera, ⁓ or you’ve moved up the corporate ladder, et cetera. Well, if you’ve never even done that, if you’ve only ever worked and you haven’t explored your interests,

⁓ hiking, walking, running, playing ball, ⁓ becoming a poker player, ⁓ whatever, whatever it is other than my job, you’re very, it’s understandable that it’s very narrow how you can explain to somebody how you occupy your time. Like what do you do? Well, I do plumbing, but I also do poker.

⁓ I do this, but I also do that. I’m that guy. Like when you ask me, sometimes I will literally be in a painting outfit, not so often now, but my painting clothes, and then I’ll take them off and I’ll sit in front of the computer and I’ll record a podcast episode. And then at the end of the day, I’ll be doing a presentation somewhere, speaking publicly on a particular topic at the moment. My favorite topic is post-traumatic growth.

When somebody asks me, what do you do? If they know me, they know I do podcasting. They know I do painting. They know I do speaking. They know I’ve written a book. ⁓ they know all these things about me. If they don’t know me, depending on which room I’m in, I’m a podcaster. If I’m in one room, I’m an author. If I’m in another room, if I’m in another room, I’m a painter and so on. And what that allows me to do is.

not be tied down to my entire existence being about only one thing, because I think that would be boring as, and I would hate to be the guy that only knows something about painting, how to paint the wall fantastically. mean, great, maybe, but not really rewarding, and not a lot of ⁓ spiritual and existential growth in painting a wall. I solve a problem for you, but I haven’t gained anything.

other than money for me. It’s not really, you know, it’s not my cup of tea anymore. Now I get to have a podcast, I get to make way less money out of a podcast episode and yet reach hundreds and thousands of people and feel really amazing about that. And what that does is that fills up my cup. That allows me to fill up my cup on the down days where I’m not earning a living. And then it allows me to go earn a living.

and then not feel like all I’m doing is working and going through the maze all day every day and just being on the constant cycle of the boredom and the sameness and all that kind of stuff. So I sprinkle a little bit of this and that into my life so that I don’t have ⁓ the same day twice because I can’t cope with the same day three times. Twice is a real bad sign for me. If there’s a third day coming, that’s gonna be the same as yesterday.

I’m not up for that, I don’t want to know about it.

Jake (59:21)
Right. Well, that also helps with your recovery. I think like, as you say, you do a lot of different things and that helps a lot. Right. So, you know, one, for instance, is, know, the, of the first things I started to think of when I was in the hospital in Sudbury and thinking of getting home is my gosh, it’s going to start getting cold soon. Winter’s going to hit. And I really have to start getting that wood all stacked. Right. So

So, you know, here I am, I’m benefiting from it now. I burn wood all winter, but, ⁓ you know, I spent a lot of my rehab ⁓ stacking wood. And I mean, that’s incredibly great physiotherapy, right? Whether you’re stacking wood or like you said, you made me think when you’re talking about painting, I’m thinking about like the karate kid, right? Like with wax on wax on paint on, this is the kind of stuff that gets you out of one particular mold.

And with your brain sort of like focused on recovering in one single area, you can recover in all these different areas. And I think they contribute to like a big picture of your recovery.

Bill (1:00:34)
I agree with that. It’s exactly right. It’s you know standing on the ladder which I do less of these days because I Felt off about a year and a half ago. So standing on the ladder and Getting down the ladder holding a paint can and applying paint ⁓ Putting drop shades down and picking up tubs of paint, you know ⁓ That whole every part of that physical activity is

using a different part of the brain. Writing a book, even if it’s only 10 minutes a day, writing half a page or 10 paragraphs or whatever it is, that uses a different part of the brain. ⁓ Public speaking, that trains and uses a different part of the brain. Everything that I do definitely kind of helps to rewire the brain in many, different ways and supports my ongoing recovery and… ⁓

is and the idea behind it amongst other things, the idea behind it from a neurological kind of perspective is that it activates more of the brain. The more of the brain that’s activated, the more chance you are of creating new neuronal pathways and having ⁓ more options for healing or recovery. And then it works emotionally for me, it works mentally for me. Do you know, so I get…

the emotional fitness and the mental fitness out of it. Speaking on the podcast, meeting people gives back. you know, that serves my, I need to serve other people purpose. Do you know, like, it’s just so much, everyone ⁓ who knows me kind of knows that I wear a lot of hats. I kind of.

I kind of like, I do it. I show people like when they’re saying, what are you up to today? I’ve been wearing a lot of hats today. And if I’m not wearing a hat, like I pretend that I put another one off or just took one off when I’m sitting with them or talking with them. It’s crazy how many things I do. And about the only hat I would prefer not to wear right now is I prefer to put the painting hat down.

and just hand that over to somebody else and just go, I think that part of my life’s done and I’ll move on to other things.

Jake (1:02:57)
If you don’t mind, have one, there’s one more thing that right now that I’d like to mention just before I forget. Is that all right? All right. All right. So the only other thing, the thing that I’ve been dealing with myself and I don’t know how many people deal with it or don’t deal with it. I know that not everybody does. don’t, I deal with a lot of post, uh, post stroke pain. So while I don’t have

Bill (1:03:04)
Yeah, of course.

Jake (1:03:25)
⁓ the misfortune of losing use of my feet or losing use of my hand. I mean, it’s limited. do therapy, but I’m able to use my hands. I’m able to write and all this. But coming along with that is an incredible amount of ⁓ burning, tingling ⁓ sort of ⁓ feelings like there is ⁓

almost like the, know, if you can think of newspapers when they’re delivered in a bundle and they’ve got this kind of plastic strapping around it. ⁓ It’s usually it’s yellow, you know, this sort of plastic strapping. I feel often like that is wrapped around my arms, like it’s wrapped around my leg. I deal with a lot of this kind of stuff, unfortunately. So again, I mean, I’m not going to sit here

and whine about it because again, ⁓ I can walk, I can do all the things that I need to do and I’d rather have that than what I do. But I’m wondering if it’s really common for a lot of people to have this, you know, post stroke pain.

Bill (1:04:44)
If

10 was the worst pain you’ve ever experienced in your life, that’s like we’re talking about 10 is somebody’s cut your limb off ⁓ and one is no pain at all. Like where would the pain be for you?

Jake (1:05:00)
Well, thankfully, again, thankfully ⁓ I’ve had some progress in this. So when I first came to, when I was first starting to get all the feeling back, ⁓ I started to notice that some feeling wasn’t coming back. But while I was in the hospital, I was on quite a lot of medication. So I was on some pretty heavy painkillers. ⁓

I think hydro-morphone, things like this. And I came off of those when I was coming home and a lot of the feelings started coming back. I would say that some days and at some times that pain can be what I would say maybe it’s a 12 out of 10. Like it’s bad. at some points I’ve been left

doing nothing but be able to just really just sit there and cry. I’m going to be honest with you. And the pain could be quite severe. Now luckily those days are few and far between. It’s not all the time. ⁓ And here’s the deal. The thing that’s very strange with the post stroke pain or the intensity of it is that it’s like

going to sleep or it’s like the start of a new day, the beginning of a new day is like a reset button’s been hit. So for instance, I could wake up on a Monday and I could be hit with the worst pain that I’ve ever had in my life. It feels literally like I’m being hit with a taser gun on the right side of my body and that while somebody’s hitting it with the taser gun, they’ve lit my hand on fire. And, ⁓

And then the very next day after I’ve gone to sleep, I woke up and I’ve had the rest. I wake up almost scared to move because for me, sort of when I wake up and I haven’t moved yet, it’s almost like nothing’s happened to me. It’s like I wake up and I don’t know that I’m numb. don’t know that I’m in pain. don’t know that all this is going on. And then I start to move and sometimes I can sit there and feel a relief. Think, wow.

There’s nothing severe going on. This is pretty good and it’s going to be a great day. Or sometimes I can be struck with a type of debilitating pain that I can’t even describe. Yeah.

Pain Management and Coping Strategies

Bill (1:07:34)
Well, what you’re describing is very common. I know a lot of people going through post stroke pain. ⁓ It is a thing. I have a very minor version of exactly the thing that you described about how the tightness and things wrapped around ⁓ your hand, like the newspaper.

that’s kind of what I feel on my left side, the whole left side all the time and the burning and tingling sensation all the time. And okay, on my worst days, these days, like it’s probably, you know, I know, it’s probably a four and a terrible one would be a five, but it doesn’t get there much. And what I’ve noticed is that the, either I’ve become more tolerant of it or my

my pain has decreased in my awareness. Like I’m aware of the fact that my limb is in the state that it’s in. And sometimes I’ll go to get a massage to get the muscles loosened up because they kind of cramp up and they don’t release. And my muscle will go well. You’re really tight today. Everything is real tight. know, have you been in pain? And I’m like,

No, I haven’t been noticing the pain, ⁓ I thought it was time for a massage, but I didn’t realize how tight everything was and how everything was working. So when I have a morning, when I have a, in the beginning, I beg your pardon, I used to wake up Monday morning was the best day. And then by Friday evening, if I’d done five days worth of work, Friday evening was the worst day.

because my resilience for recovery had decreased, waned over those last two days of the week. And then I needed Saturday and Sunday to get back to it. So post stroke pain is very, very common. A lot of people are experiencing it. ⁓ I would encourage people who are listening here on this episode, if you’ve got all the way through it, ⁓ just leave some comments in YouTube. Just let us know.

If you’re someone who’s experienced any of the things that Jake has inquired about, maybe we can start a conversation, give some more insights to Jake. And then you’ll find that ⁓ there’ll be specific kind of post stroke pain communities, I would say on places like Facebook or somewhere there. There might even be clinics specifically in Ottawa or in the areas that deal with

⁓ neurological kind of pain. There are clinics that deal with that. I don’t know if anyone has found other ways to get around it other than pain medication and to what extent, but I know that I feel my deficits more when I eat really badly. So maybe something that you might pay attention to is if you have a particular food, if you diarize what you eat and then

notice how you feel the next day or a day later or half an hour later or half a day later, that might give you bit of an insight. I used to notice some of my deficits get worse after high carb meals. And then that would enable me to go, okay, I’m gonna try that again, see if it happens again, and then avoid that particular type of meal or that percentage of carbs on my plate as opposed to protein or vegetables. So just one of those.

little things that might help, but it’s not going to turn a 12 out of 10 into a five out of 10. Do you know it’s, there’s just little strategies that just kind of support, ⁓ your, the way you experience your body all the time and not all the time, like the way that you influence how you experience your body, it supports that.

because I used to find that I used to make my deficits worse by doing the wrong things. And my whole aim in my life was if I’m doing that and that’s making my deficits worse, then I don’t want to be the guy that’s making my deficits worse. Alcohol is a classic example of one of those things. I drink, I feel like I’m having another stroke. It’s like, forget that, I’m not going down that path. And people who have had a stroke less than 12 months.

ago should not be drinking at all. In fact, if you’ve had a stroke, my recommendation is to never drink alcohol ever again. I didn’t drink for the first five years after my stroke. And then I’ve had maybe three or four beers a year since then ⁓ at the most, you know, so.

Jake (1:12:32)
thought of it terrifies me, be honest, just anything like that terrifies me. Like, don’t like the thought of it. Like, had I been a smoker, I probably would have quit. don’t like the thought of like, I feel like even like if I even if I drank that one beer, and then I did have a stroke, then I won’t know whether that’s what did it or not. You know what I mean? Like, I don’t want to be the person who precipitates the next event.

Bill (1:13:00)
Imagine having high blood pressure without smoking and then smoking and making it even worse. It’s pretty terrible. I used to smoke and I stopped as well after the first brain hemorrhage.

You know, what a waste of time and effort putting money into cigarettes and filling my lungs with chemicals that shouldn’t be there. It’s just crazy that I was doing that, but nonetheless, same with alcohol. It’s just part of the culture. So we do what the culture suggested we did. We did it. And then I never really enjoyed it or I never really got anything out of it other than being.

inebriated and then again, it was like what for it’s not serving a benefit. There is no benefit. Now I people smoke and drink to ⁓ intervene in their emotional state, you know, to, dull some emotional pain and all that kind of stuff. All right. Short term, maybe that’s a good strategy for maybe one week or two weeks. But then after that, there is no strategy that I think.

is worth putting that much time and effort into and money into substances to quell your emotions. You might as well put that time, money and effort into the psychological, emotional rehabilitation so that you become free of those emotions and experiences. And then that way, you know, gain wisdom rather than…

avoided pain and that’s the way I see it. So I know that alcohol serves a lot of purposes, but maybe this is some just food for thought, give people a different way of contemplating how they’ve gone about their life before, you know.

Jake (1:14:56)
Yep. Yeah. Well, I would say that, you know, as far as things go, like smoking, like smoking, did when I was quite, quite a bit younger, I did quit, you know, when my first daughter was born. So I did have that as a, probably as an ongoing risk factor, you know, that, that, that may have been lingering behind. Other than that, ⁓ yeah, I don’t see the, the, I don’t see the purpose. I, I’ve watched some of the guys who were in hospital,

four stroke, that’s part of the reason why I chose not to hang around with the other folks who were there at the lounge and in the hospital, is they were there in hospital four stroke and they were already outside smoking. And ⁓ it blew, to be honest, it blew my mind. it was amazing to me. They were smoking, they were having a whole lot of fast food.

Bill (1:15:38)
Yeah.

Jake (1:15:51)
brought into the hospital by their buddies and they were doing all these things and I couldn’t fathom it. I guess maybe it’s, I think there’s just two different kinds of people, right? And I think that the ones who want to get better, they always end up watching your podcast.

Community and Shared Experiences

Bill (1:16:10)
at some stage, I so. I hope so, you know. I don’t profess to know anything or, you know, but I can say that the people that I speak to do know a lot and together, ⁓ even if you just get one little gold nugget out of an episode, that’s job done, you know. We’ve done the job, just different way of thinking, experiencing, knowing that you’re not alone. You know, your questions are really cool.

in that what you’re trying to do is work out whether there’s other people in your situation. Now that will maybe do a couple of things that might make you feel better that you’re not alone, but it also might make you feel like, if I’ve been here, if I’m here and they’ve been there, maybe somebody is working on this situation, know, this issue, because there’s a lot of people there, right? So then that helps you find resources. ⁓ People might have hacks on how to improve or…

I’ve become something that you can catch up on really quickly, know, four months into your recovery instead of wait 10 years to find it out. That’s the whole purpose of this. It’s like, how do we decrease the time that it takes for people to come across that next gold nugget, you know, that’s going to take them in the right direction. ⁓ I really appreciate you reaching out and joining me on the podcast, Jake. think, ⁓ it’s been a great conversation. I look forward to actually hearing about you.

say a year from now, just to see how far things have come, because I feel like you’re gonna have made massive strides. And even though you might be still dealing with some challenges related to the deficits, I think you’ll have a lot of solutions and it’ll be worth hearing about.

Jake (1:17:52)
Thank very much, Bill. It’s been really great talking to you and I’ve really, really benefited from your podcast. Like I’m sure a lot of other people have, but I just really felt like ⁓ I wanted to at least give back to some people who might be coming across this in an early stages stroke like I was. ⁓ hopefully some people can benefit from our conversation. Bill, thank you so much.

Bill (1:18:19)
Thank you, mate.

Bill Gasiamis (1:18:20)
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Recovery After Stroke podcast. And thank you to Jake for sharing a story that really takes courage to tell, especially so early in recovery.

One thing I hope you’ll take from this conversation is that stroke effects aren’t always obvious

and they don’t always follow a neat, predictable path. Recovery isn’t just physical, it’s emotional, it’s frustrating, it’s confusing, and sometimes it’s painful in ways no one prepared you for.

Jake’s story reminds us that healing doesn’t mean returning to who you were. It means learning how to live with what’s changed while we’re still moving

this episode helped you feel understood or gave you language for something you’ve been struggling to explain, remember that you can support this work

at patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke. Every contribution helps keep these conversations online and moves us closer to my goal of recording a thousand episodes. So no stroke survivor ever feels like they’re doing this alone. And if you haven’t already, you can order my book, The Unexpected Way That a Stroke Became the Best Thing That Happened.

by going to recoveryafterstroke.com/book.

Many people expect it to be just my personal story, but it’s actually a practical companion for stroke survivors and caregivers filled with insights I wished I’d had

when I was lost trying to rebuild my life. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. And remember, you’re not alone in this.

See you on the next episode.