The day my Life changed

August 8th 2013 was the day my reality would be altered forever.

I was 22 years old at the time when everything changed. It wasn’t gradual, and there wasn’t a warning. It was literally a blink of an eye, one moment I was a young adult, busy living a fast-paced life; social, active, always on the go—and the next, I was waking up in a hospital bed, my body foreign to me, my voice gone, my reality cracked wide open.

I had a stroke.

I don’t remember all the details, but apparently I was born with an arteriovenous malformation, or AVM for short. Some of the details were told to my family while I was unconscious, but some never made their way back to me. Or some did but my memory wasn't the best in the beginning and for some reason nobody took that into consideration. That gap—that silence—has followed me ever since. In the beginning, I didn’t have the mental clarity or emotional strength to ask the right questions. Now, over a decade later, I’m still trying to fill in those blanks. It was 5 years later when I found out what exactly my AVM was. I always explained it as a jumbled knot not veins in my head but it was an artery that fused with a vein and one carried high blood pressure and the other carry low blood pressure, the one that was supposed to be carrying low blood pressure couldn't stand the high pressure blood flow and it ruptured causing a stroke. Now it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out if you're up high jumping off things and nearly falling you probably would have high blood pressure. And then it took me 8 years to figure out that individuals who sustained a brain injury have trouble with organizing and planning... Those terms would have been extremely helpful when trying to explain things. I don't know why nobody told me that. I found out because I myself, read a flyer outside my speech therapist office at the rehab center.

At 22, you think your life is just starting. You imagine career plans, relationships, independence. I imagined all that too. What I didn’t imagine was numbness on my entire left side, being in a wheelchair, navigating communication with slurred speech, ataxia, and losing coordination and depth perception. What I didn’t imagine was having to relearn not just how to move—but how to live.

And yet, I did.

Not perfectly. Not easily. But piece by piece, I began to stitch a new life together. And this post, this blog on my site is one way I’m reclaiming the story that was almost never told from my perspective.

This is just the beginning