One week after graduating from university, Bethany Taylor’s life was turned upside down, when a stroke left her believing she was just five years old.
Until that moment, the 22-year-old had been enjoying the chaos of student life in her last year at Edinburgh University, with a dream of working in the civil service.
‘I had it all sorted out,’ Bethany tells Metro. ‘I applied for jobs when I was in my final year of uni, but unfortunately hadn’t got anywhere, as I needed to get some more experience. So, my plan was to go home for a year, get a casual job, and then at some point, move down to London and live my life there.’
Bethany was just a month away from graduating when she started experiencing severe headaches – something she put down to the pressure she was feeling at university.
‘I googled it and the suggestion was I was probably developing migraines, so I wrote it off as being nothing too serious. I’ve always been quite a headachy person, anyway, so didn’t think much of it,’ she remembers.
However, as the days went on, Bethany began feeling ‘quite tired and short tempered’.
When the weekend arrived, she visited her grandad in Lincolnshire in the hope that maybe some rest would help her feel better, but instead, she continued to feel worse.
‘I was very, very tired and headachy. I slept a lot,’ she explains.
After seeing her grandfather, Bethany returned to her mum’s house on the Sunday night and immediately went to bed in her old room.
The next morning, believing that she was sleeping in, her mum and sister, Jessie, went out to the shops. When they returned at lunchtime and Bethany still hadn’t surfaced, the pair started to worry.
‘Mum came into my bedroom and immediately knew something was wrong with me. She told me it was like I was unconscious, but my eyes were open. I couldn’t talk and had dribble all down one side of my face,’ explains Bethany.
‘She was desperately trying to get me out of bed and I just couldn’t. I could walk, but not properly.’
Bethany’s frantic mum called 111, and an ambulance quickly arrived to take her to hospital. There, the doctors discovered she had suffered a blood clot in her brain, which had caused a stroke, and transferred her to intensive care.
She was quickly put in a coma, so her body had the best chance of recovery.
‘Apparently, the doctor told my family that if I was still alive by the following Friday, I would be okay. It was very touch and go,’ says Bethany. ‘They were all devastated and overwhelmed with disbelief at what had happened to me.
‘Mum ended up staying in the hospital by my side, and slept in the hospital for six weeks.’
When Bethany woke five days later, her relieved friends and family discovered they had another challenge on their hands, as she was suffering from post-traumatic amnesia.
Bethany still has no recollection today and relies on her loved ones to tell her what happened.
‘They said I thought I was five years old. It probably wasn’t helped by the fact that all the people that were coming to see me were friends that I had when I was younger,’ Bethany explains. ‘I think that all combined into one thing, and left me really confused.’
‘Apparently, at one point, I was convinced I’d received a card from one of my teachers, as I was still a pupil at primary school. Just the other day, my dad told me that I kept saying to him, there’s a box of teeth under my bed, can you bring them to me so I can eat them?
‘I was acting very childish and I’m relieved I don’t have memories of that. I think my awareness came back very slowly. Doctors and nurses were coming in every day and asking: “what’s your name? Where are you? How old are you? Who’s the prime minister?” All to try and remind me of the present day. Eventually, it worked.’
While her early days in hospital are hazy, Bethany can remember the moment her memory came flooding back after about four weeks and with it, an overwhelming amount of emotions.
‘I turned to my mum and said, “what’s happened?”, and she told me I’d had a stroke. I remember being very confused,’ says Bethany.
‘I thought that strokes only happened to the elderly, so I remember thinking that I must’ve been the first young person it happened to.
To be honest, I was so out of it, I wasn’t really aware of what happened until about a month later. I’m glad I don’t remember much.’
Bethany spent another two weeks in hospital and faced an arduous battle as she began her recovery. The stroke, which doctors believe might have been down to a rare side effect of the contraceptive pill, had caused a blood clot in the frontal lobe of her brain.
Previously a passionate bookworm, it meant she woke up not being able to do basic tasks.
‘I had to learn to read and write again. I was so tired as well, which is something that still impacts me,’ remembers Bethany.
After leaving hospital, she continued her recovery, going to speech therapy and working with an occupational therapist, both in and out of hospital.
‘It was very helpful’, Bethany explains. ‘We would go to the shops and buy ingredients and cook meals. My therapist made me a plan and helped me organise days. I found a planner the other day, with a note saying “try and get up at 1pm”. At that point, I had been out of hospital for two years and was still struggling with chronic fatigue.’
Bethany also had to come to terms with the fact that while recovering she had ‘lost’ years of her life.
‘About five years after my stroke, I was chatting to my mum about how I was looking forward to doing everything I wanted to do in my early twenties. But she reminded me I was much older now and the life I wanted back then is different now,’ she remembers.
‘When I realised what she was saying, I just burst into tears as I grieved for the life I could’ve led.’
Seven years on from her stroke, recovery been a long process. ‘In the beginning, I was sleeping fifteen hours a night, and I was unable to live a life. Now, I’m back to sleeping a normal amount,’ Bethany explains.
Currently, she’s seeing a very familiar story to hers play out on Coronation Street after teenage character Betsy Swain (Sydney Martin) suffered a stroke as a result of a blood clot caused by damage to an artery, when her boyfriend put pressure on her neck while they were having sex.
‘I was struck by how much the actress [Sydney Martin] must’ve listened to the people during her research’, says Bethany. ‘Our strokes were very different in some ways, but she is accurately portraying how it impacted me and what recovery was like.
‘Plus, people often think strokes only happen to old people – but it clearly doesn’t. Betsy’s story is a really good way to show that it can happen to anyone.’
Just like the Coronation Street character, Bethany knows exactly what it’s like to not leave her house after the stroke, saysing that she felt felt ’embarrassed’ and ‘worried’ about all she’d been through.
However, she also believes she made such a large amount of progress in facing the outside world because of her friends and’amazing family’.
Now 29, Bethany works as a disability support worker, helping disabled people do their job – a career she believes she would never have found if she didn’t have her stroke.
‘It’s really rewarding – I help them, but I’m also helping myself because I’m continuing to work and use my brain.’
During her recovery, Bethany was also supported by the Stroke Association charity, who have a telephone line called Here For You, which connects stroke survivors and carers to trained volunteers. Today, she’s a volunteer herself.
‘I think that is one of the things that has helped me the most, talking to people who have been through the same,’ she adds.
‘The volunteer who spoke to me was a young person who had a stroke, and she was saying, “this is what my life looks like now”, and it made me realise, my life doesn’t have to be over because I’ve had a stroke.’
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