Writer and critic Robert McCrum outlines to Padraig O'Morain how he applied indomitable resolve to recover from a stroke.
On the evening of July 28th, 1995, Robert McCrum, then editor-in-chief at Faber & Faber, had dinner with a friend at a restaurant in Covent Garden.
A nagging headache which he'd had all day was still bothering him. So was his inexplicable tiredness and the blurring of his speech after just two glasses of champagne.
After dinner, he got a taxi home feeling desperately tired. The taxi driver, thinking he was drunk, repeated his address back to him with contempt.
He dragged himself into his house - his wife was on a visit to the United States - made himself a cup of tea and went to bed.
When he woke up the next morning, realising he had overslept, he fell to the floor as he made to get out of bed.
His left side was paralysed and the dead weight of his body was enough to make him fall.
He had suffered a stroke and, he writes in his book My Year Off, "literally overnight, I was changed from being someone who could order an expensive meal in a fashionable restaurant to being an incontinent carcass, quite unable to make any sense of his body."
There followed hospitalisation, physiotherapy, depression and frustration but now he is back at work as literary editor of the Observer.
Tonight he gives the inaugural Mick Doyle Lecture, hosted by the Irish Heart Foundation supported by The Irish Times.
At the event in the National Gallery in Merrion Square, Dublin, he will address his audience on the theme "Coming in from the storm".
Irish rugby giant Mick Doyle, who died in a car crash last year, had a stroke in 1996. He too returned to work following a battle in which his indomitable spirit brought him to reasonable health.
McCrum, too, applied an indomitable spirit and was supported all along the way by his wife, Sarah.
"My basic message is never surrender," he told The Irish Times.
"I quite often think of my Northern Ireland family and that indomitable resolve not to give in."
His great great grandfather, a "linen baron", built the village of Milford near Armagh, "one of the most delightful places on earth", he says.
His great grandfather, William McCrum, who played for the local soccer team, is credited with inventing the penalty so that, at least, he says, gives him something in common with Mick Doyle.
In tonight's lecture, he says, he will focus on the emotional aspect of having a stroke.
"There's a physical dimension and an emotional dimension. The emotional side is the part that gets lost.
"Doctors should take into account how people feel. It feels like you have suddenly lost your own life but you have survived. The life you had no longer exists in any shape or form. I think one is dealing with cycles of grief. It's a fairly selfish process."
Interestingly, Mick Doyle made the same point in his book, Zero Point One Six: Living in Extra Time: "A brain haemorrhage makes you very insular. You become totally self-centred and obsessed with getting better. You home in on it."
Robert McCrum knew nothing about strokes when he had his at the age of 42. As befits a man whose credits include the award-winning TV series The Story of English, he points out in his book that 'stroke' is "a word whose Old English origin connotes 'a blow' and 'a calamity'."
Curiously, on the day he woke up with his left side paralysed, he did not experience panic and despair so much as frustration, puzzlement and curiosity.
As he lay there, trying to work out how to get to a phone, "I had no inkling of how ruthlessly I had been disconnected from the world of appointments and obligations, or how long it would be before I returned to it.
"Suffer a stroke and you find that the complex wiring we call 'the individual in society' is peremptorily ripped from the fusebox of everyday life.
"I have been incredibly fortunate," he says of his return to that world.
"I made enough of a recovery to be able to get on with a job. It's a very fascinating, always enthralling job and has some degree of influence though less than people think."
When he thinks back on the stroke now "it feels like a very, very bad dream - but it's not at the time."