At 42, Robert McCrum suffered a severe stroke that paralysed his left side. He spent three months in hospital, then a year recovering slowly and getting himself back in the world, and this book describes that time. It had a particular personal resonance for me because, at roughly the same age, I spent part of the year it was published recovering from surgery on a brain tumour. I could identify closely with some of the disabilities McCrum wrote about but more especially with the emotional ups and downs he highlighted.
In his convalescence, the enforced leisure was an opportunity to explore himself, “to analyse what made me tick and to discover what mattered to me. Alone in my room, with only my right arm functioning properly … and with the demons of physical exhaustion constantly at hand, I began to keep a diary.”
His wife did likewise. Extracts from both diaries are included in the book, which creates immediacy and authenticity as we see first-hand what the couple felt and thought during such a traumatic time.
McCrum details the pain and frustrations but also the joys of rehabilitation. Six weeks after the stroke, as his wife was taking off his socks, they suddenly saw independent movement in some of his left toes. “It was like finding life on Mars.”
When I awoke from my brain operation, my right side from the waist down was numb. I still vividly recall the sheer joy experienced when, some weeks later, I felt movement in my right big toe.
As well as helping and giving hope to those who suffer strokes, McCrum wrote the book for their families and loved ones, “who, sucked into the vortex of catastrophic illness, find themselves searching for words of encouragement and explanation”.
And, of course, he wrote the book for himself, to try to make sense of the extraordinary personal upheaval he’d been through. “I have learned … that I am not immortal (the fantasy of youth) and yet, strangely, in the process I have been renewed in my understanding of family and, finally, of the only thing that really matters: love.”
