The Deals Still Running in My Head

When the stroke hit, my first panic was not about my brain. It was about who would host my dinner.

Hi, I’m Michael, and I’m a stroke survivor.

I had my stroke on a Friday morning. I will never forget it, because that night I was due to host a networking dinner for 22 people. I had been running those dinners three or four times a year since 2006. The stroke was in 2022, so by then it was practically muscle memory.

So there was the small matter of “Wow, I have had a stroke, what do I do?”, which resulted in an ambulance and a trip to Emergency. And then there I was, lying in a hospital bed, panicking.

Most people are not surprised to hear I was panicking. They nod and say, “It must have been so frightening.” They are usually shocked when I explain that the panic was coming from a completely different direction. I was not lying there terrified about my brain. I was lying there worried about how I was going to host my dinner that night.

Unless you are dead, you turn up

I have always been trained that unless you are dead, you turn up and do what you said you would do.

Let me give you the evidence. A few years earlier I had been invited to a Super Bowl event by a key advisor. The night before, I was admitted to hospital with my first gallstone attack, and discharged at around one in the morning. A little Endone and morphine was not going to stop me. Not showing up would have been rude. So at 10am I turned up in a suit, as expected. I still remember the look on my host’s face when I appeared. He offered me a seat, gave me a glass of water, let me chill for thirty minutes, then very gently suggested I call an Uber and go home to bed.

That is me. So of course, mid-stroke, flat on my back in Emergency, the thing eating me alive was not the clot in my brain. It was the thought: what kind of host does not turn up to his own dinner? I was genuinely worried about how it would look, right up until the nurses cheerfully assured me I was not going anywhere.

Me stroke, big stroke, you dinner

I decided to fix it. I would text a friend who was coming that night and get him to take over as host. Cancelling at that hour would be unforgivable.

There is one problem with executing a clean handover in the middle of a stroke. The hormones flooding your brain mean you are not thinking straight, and my thumbs were not exactly at their best either. Add my phone’s autocorrect to the mix, and the message I actually sent read:

“me stroke, big stroke, you dinner”

Apparently this was not the crisp brief I imagined it to be. My friend rang to work out what on earth I meant. I answered and started making strange sounds down the phone. I can still remember the long, long pause while he tried to understand what the hell was happening. Eventually he said he would call my wife.

Ten minutes later, a text came back.

“Spoke to T. Understand the situation. I will run dinner. Good luck. We are here for you.”

And finally, I could relax. The dinner was sorted. Only now, with that off my plate, could I turn to the other item on the agenda. So, I have had a stroke. What does that actually mean?

This is how a driven person tackles it

I know how this sounds. A man has a serious stroke and his first coherent act is to protect a dinner party. It sounds absurd. It is also completely true, and if you are one of us, you are not laughing, you are nodding.

For a certain kind of person, the first instinct in a crisis is not “am I alright?” It is “who is covering my commitments?” That is not vanity and it is not denial. It is the operating system. The drive that made me reliable for sixteen years of dinners did not have a stroke. It was sitting there in the wreckage, fully intact, still trying to run the schedule.

Here is the part I have had to learn since. That instinct is a strength and a danger wearing the same coat. The same wiring that made me sort the dinner would happily have discharged me from Emergency to go and host it, and that would have been a catastrophe. Knowing when your drive is serving you and when it is endangering you is the single most important thing a driven survivor has to work out.

For the person who employs one of us

If someone on your team goes down like this, understand what is actually happening in their head. They are probably more anxious about the handover than about themselves. That loyalty is real, and it is worth more than you know.

So do the thing my friend did. Take the dinner off their plate, completely and convincingly, and tell them it is handled. Not “don’t worry about work,” which never lands, but the specific, believable “I have got this, here is who is covering what.” That message was not a nicety. It was the thing that finally let me stop managing and start recovering. I could not face the stroke until I knew the dinner was in safe hands.

The nurses were right. I was not going anywhere. But first, I had to sort the dinner. Then, and only then, could I get on with having a stroke.