After my stroke, my husband, Nishant, and I turned to doctors and therapists to help us understand what recovery might look like. But some of what we heard was difficult to accept.

One therapist told me I could forget about returning to work. My doctor told me that whatever recovery I made in the first three months would be all I could expect.

Those predictions were difficult to live with. But Nishant and I weren't ready to accept that our hopes for recovery had to end there.

We started small. Swallowing became easier. Words began to return. Each small improvement gave us something we desperately needed: hope.

Months passed, and I was still making progress. Eventually, we discovered that what we had been experiencing had a name: neuroplasticity.

In this episode of Return to Myself, I share how Nishant and I learned to look beyond the predictions we had been given. We worked on getting me out of the wheelchair, then walking without an ankle-foot orthosis. Years later, I even found myself learning to crawl again.

Along the way, we discovered the value of repetition, persistence, and finding new opportunities for my brain to learn.

What began as a belief that recovery was still possible became something much more personal: the experience of discovering, again and again, that I could still make progress.



Closing music: “Classical 2” by Jonny S., courtesy of Mixkit.