THEY DAY I ALMOST DIDN’T MAKE IT

Do you know what most people take for granted, until something bad happens? Have a guess…

You’re right: their health. They take their health for granted.

Guilty as charged!

I thought I was leading my best life as a serial sitter in my soundproof voice over studio. I mean…. I got paid to talk, how cool is that?! I ate whatever I wanted to eat, and how much I wanted to eat. And when I was done recording and editing and doing my admin and social media, I watched Netflix all night long, still sitting on my big fat behind.

There’s a reason why so many of my voice over colleagues are overweight and diabetic, and have turned to drugs like Ozempic. They sit still all day long and stare at a screen. Because they’re voice actors, their looks don’t matter, so you can get away with being a slob.

I was like that. Overweight and out of shape. I didn’t even know I had Afib, which is short for Atrial Fibrillation. It means I have a dangerously fast and irregular heart beat. They say sitting is the new smoking, and leading a “successful” sedentary life eventually caught up with me.

A MASSIVE STROKE

One day, some six years ago, I was recording in my hermetically sealed studio, and I suffered a massive stroke. Half of my body was paralyzed, I had a piercing headache, part of my face was drooping, and my speech became slurred.

Worst of all, I was home alone, and the noises I tried to make to alert the neighbors made no difference because I had locked myself up in a soundproof room. I fell to the floor, trying to breathe the remaining oxygen when I passed out.

To cut a long story short, that evening I didn’t show up to a meeting I was supposed to go to. A meeting my wife Pam also attended, and when I didn’t arrive, something told my wife I was in serious trouble. She called friends of ours to check in with me, and also asked the police to do a welfare check, just to be sure.

Remember this: when someone has a stroke, time is of the essence. The faster you can get help, the greater the chance of recovery. Till this day I have no idea how long it took before they found me, paralyzed and gasping for air. The important thing was that I was rescued in the nick of time.

A helicopter took me to a stroke center where a specialist removed a big blood clot from my brain and saved my life. When I woke up in the ICU, I couldn’t walk and I couldn’t talk. What they didn’t tell me was that they’d nearly lost me twice, while trying to stabilize me.

How did I survive?

I’ll talk about that next.