Featured in Glasgow magazine News in the City
Twenty-seven-year-old Sean Smith has his mantra figured out – live life to its fullest and stay positive. It’s a cliché, sure, but if you’d had a stroke at the age of 25 and had almost fully recovered after being told you’d possibly never walk again, you’d maybe want to try living by clichés too.
Waking up fully clothed on the living room floor after a night of heavy drinking is perhaps not an unfamiliar situation for those who party hard. But what happened to Sean on the morning after the night before in February 2009 was something altogether different from your usual hangover.
“I woke up and was trying to get up off the floor, and only my left hand was moving, and I just sort of rolled onto my back…It was a bizarre, strange sensation. Then I tried to lift my right leg up to get some leverage to lift myself up, and that wasn’t working either!” he remarks with a look and tone of bewilderment, as though he’s experiencing it again for the first time.
“I’d thought maybe my arm had gone to sleep, but I soon realised something wasn’t how it should be.” He furrows his dark eyebrows, seemingly reliving the confusion, and explains how when he shouted on his girlfriend she thought he was still drunk until she noticed blood dripping from his lip: “I must have taken a tumble or something.”
Dressed in scruffy jeans and a leather jacket, with dishevelled dark hair and slight stubble, Sean’s pretty much the epitome of a 20-something boy in a band who rides a bike – another cliché.
But what he doesn’t have is that scowling bad boy attitude. In fact, he adopts quite a different outlook, filled with an enviable positivity and determination that would put the best of us to shame.
When he and his girlfriend realised there was definitely something very wrong that morning, an ambulance was called, and he was rushed to hospital in a half-paralysed daze.
He looks thoughtful as he recalls the events, speaking quickly with a sense of urgency, as though wanting to get the images out before he forgets them: “My mind was in a bit of a state” he says matter of fact, “it’s going to sound strange saying this,” he continues hesitantly, “- it was a strange sensation…but it was a positive sensation.” He says it as though asking a question, needing some kind of clarification that what he’s saying is correct: “It was almost like being on drugs, like being sedated or something – everything’s fine but you feel a bit high. Do you know what I mean?”
I didn’t know what he meant. But I nodded anyway. Regardless of whether I knew exactly what he meant or not, this drug comparison pretty much sums Sean up. Despite having suffered a brain haemorrhage at such a young age and thinking he may never walk again, he takes an incredibly mature stance on life – as though no matter what it decides to throw at him, he’ll just ride it, like a drug, taking the good with the bad, all the time eager to rise with the high. He likes to use analogies a lot, he says – it’s sometimes the only way he can try to explain things to people.
“The doctor’s would ask me to tell them in percentages how near to ‘normal’ I was feeling, so I would tell them a little higher than I actually thought – I’d give myself a benchmark and try to beat it.
“But then even a year ago I’d say I thought I was about 90% there…but I wasn’t. There would be gradual movement coming back bit by bit…like…” He looks down at the table, as though the words he’s looking for are hidden somewhere in the marble-effect pattern: “It’s really hard to describe,” he says, apologetically.
He tries again to explain, and we throw around some ideas as to what he means exactly, but nothing quite hits the mark.
“It was almost like a jigsaw,” he eventually says – “yeah, we’ll look at it like a jigsaw. You know what the picture looks like, but you don’t know how many bits it’s going to take to complete it. In fact, that’s brilliant! That’s exactly what it was like!” he exclaims through a laugh, delighted with this new metaphor: “Trying to explain these things when I don’t have analogies is hard, because they’re experiences I can’t put into words almost.”
It’s nearly three years on, and looking at him you’d never know there had been anything wrong. He walks as well as the next person; his speech is clear; he can move everything down the right side of his body almost as well as he can his left.
“There are still wee niggly bits…like trying to pick up a pin. I mean, I can pick up a cup and drink from it, and stuff like that, but I can’t pick up a pin.
“I’d say I’m at a really high percentage now I suppose. But again, in a couple of weeks I’ll pick up extra sensations that will add to the overall picture and realise I’ve still a bit to go.”
Still a bit to go or not, he’s doing pretty well. Not only does he have a new job as a theatre venue technician, which he loves, but he has been able to pick up and play his trombone again, and has re-joined his jazz/ska band ‘Almighty Me’. I ask him about the band but he asks excitedly and sheepishly if he can tell me another story instead.
“Two months before the stroke, I passed my motorbike driving test. I was over the moon! I’d wanted to ride a bike for years! So I got my licence, then two months later had to forget about it, basically.”
He tells me about how his bike sat out the front of his house, which he shares with his girlfriend, and how when he got out of hospital he would go outside and walk around it, looking at it, just wishing he could get on.
“I was absolutely gutted at not being able to ride it; so I sold it.” By the mischievous grin on his face I can tell this wasn’t the end of the bike, he’s too excited by this story and with the Christmas music playing in the background, I can’t help but absorb his giddiness: “About two/three months later, I bought another one…but I didn’t know if I was going to be able to ride it. It was a goal – I said to myself, you want that bike you’re going to have to learn to ride it again. And I did. I got back on the bike.”
‘That must have made you feel amazing?’, I offer up, but he takes this, like everything else it seems, completely in his stride.
“Well…yeah! But I mean, even things like when I was walking with a crutch and ankle support and stuff like that, I was chucking all that away. I’d always push myself to take gradual steps. There was always some kind of extra movement appearing in me every so often, so I figured there was every chance I was going to improve further.”
Instead of feeling sorry for himself, Sean picked up all the pieces from his pre-stroke life and powered on, even picking up some new hobbies: “Because of what’s happened to me, I’ve become fascinated by the brain, like how it works, the plasticity of it, why I’ve recovered,” he explains, “I’ve looked into loads of examples of people who have had brain damage but overcome it.”
Sean tells me he has always been a positive person, but would say he was more so now. The way he sees it is he had a choice – he could view his stroke as a negative experience, or he could view it as a positive one: “If I’d thought negatively of it I don’t know if I would have had the same outcome or recovery. If I’d thought negatively of it, I wouldn’t have made life easier,” he says bluntly. He’s right.
Post-stroke, he’s noticed a lot of this “positive thinking stuff” going on, and believes there’s a lot to be said for this kind of recovery process. Recalling his own hospital experience, he’s eager to get across that the staff were great and did a good job, but it wasn’t enough.
Talking about being cooped up in the hospital stroke ward amongst people on the other side of 50, he says: “I don’t want to say it’s like a conveyor belt, but it’s all very sort of regimental. It’s more concentrating on the symptoms rather than taking the person as a whole. It’s like ‘we don’t care what you think about it, we’re just going to look at getting rid of that, or fixing this. They zoom it right in rather than looking at the big picture.”
He explains how this drastically affects patient morale: “You’re sitting about, all day, on a seat without a whole lot of stimulation. I mean, I was sitting about doing nothing, but my idea of my recovery was to try to get myself moving again.
“The recovery process in hospitals is stuck in the past, I think,” he adds.
This has got me thinking. I look at him sitting there, and think of all the things he has patched back together, like a jigsaw, in such a short time, and I’m embarrassed as I realise I would definitely have chosen the ‘woe me’ path.
Sean has just recently been for his final routine scan, and with no further malformations in his brain, has been given the all clear. An amazing relief and something to be delighted about surely? Needless to say he’s as ridiculously laid back about this as he is about the rest of the situation.
“My memory was affected, my speech was affected and generally trying to find my bearings was affected, so everything was pretty much affected,” he had told me at the start of our conversation. It seems to me the only thing that hadn’t been negatively ‘affected’ was his spirit. To revert back to the old clichés – always look on the bright side of life: “It started off as a rollercoaster…but I was really trying to stay positive about it the whole time.”
Fall for pretty strangers 