Within a few weeks of being home it happened for the first time while visiting some family a semi- distant younger relative was asking about my recovery, not long after I stood up to go to the toilet; as he watched me walk to the toilet with my hiking pole he told me I was “an inspiration, Ben”

A couple of weeks after that someone found my blog and contacted me to say they had read it all and my journey was inspirational to read.

I appreciate the sentiment of these words are nice and well meaning but no one has ever said things like that to me before, not when I went to university with two young children a job and a mortgage, not when I won awards for my outstanding work developments to help cancer patients as an openly gay man in a northern working town that hadn’t progressed since 1975.

DioI feel inspirational? No, I played the word over in my mind and the only reasoning I could think was; there’s been countless stroke survivors before me who have gone on to achieve so much, my rehab feels very run of the mill and normal, and I never really had a choice in any of this. The stroke happened and either I prepared to lay in bed for months, maybe years then possibly a wheelchair or I start again trying to regain and learn; perhaps that wasn’t an easy choice and people see that but again most stroke patients try to get some recovery. I don’t feel unique or special, I certainly don’t feel like an inspiration. I follow 2 stroke survivors on instagram who ore inspirational to me, one is a lovely chap from Blackburn who pre stroke was a firefighter and just over a year after his stroke was back working in incredible physical condition and back behind the wheel of a fire engine; the other a young Canadian guy who had a stroke in his early 20s while playing ice hockey; in a year he was back on the ice and also in the gym looking great; these men who bounced back so quickly and regained their lives were inspirational to me. My very normal journey so far was not