What one woman learned from having a stroke at 47

As a teacher for more than 20 years, education had always been a major part of Mary Borrelli’s life. But she never imagined that at age 47, she would have to relearn everything she knew.

Just after she was appointed to serve as an acting principal at the school she attended growing up, Mary’s life changed forever when she had a massive stroke.

Eight years later, she’s back in the classroom and sharing six things that the experience taught her.

1. An observant friend can save your life

One morning a teacher at the school where Mary worked noticed that she was absent. Mary had just been named acting principal two months before, and the teacher knew it wasn’t like her friend not to be out greeting the kids and staff. She decided to go to Mary’s house to see what was wrong. She saw Mary’s car in the driveway, but when she knocked on the door, no one answered. That’s when she called 000.

Firefighters crawled in through an open window and found Mary unconscious on the floor.

“I woke up and said, ‘Oh my God, thank you, thank you,” Borrelli recalls. “I didn’t remember [anything else about had happened] until three weeks later.”

2. How to be patient

When Mary woke up in intensive care she initially thought everything was fine. “Everybody was visiting me, and they would always come to my left side,” Borrelli remembers. She eventually learned she’d had a major stroke that paralysed the right side of her body. Mary had also lost her ability to speak because the stroke had damaged parts of her brain responsible for language, a condition known as aphasia.

By the time Mary was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital, she could follow conversations but couldn’t respond in real time.

“When everybody finished talking, I would answer all their questions, shaking my head no, no, yes, no, yes, yes,” Borrelli recalls.

3. Home holds a deep emotional connection

After nearly a year of occupational and physical therapy, Mary’s therapists took her home in an ambulance to see if it was safe for her to return instead of going to a long-term care facility.

When Mary walked up the eight stairs to the home she’d lived in since childhood, she cried. “I hadn’t been home in ten months,” Borrelli explains. Family members had built a bathroom on the first floor and converted her dining room into a bedroom so she could return home for good.

4. Life can be fortuitous

When Mary got to the rehabilitation centre, she was still struggling with her speech and thought that her teaching and administrative career was over. But another speech therapist encouraged Mary to go to a community aphasia group there.

“Everybody had a story, and everybody was talking like me,” Borrelli says. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I have found a home with these people.’”

She didn’t really speak during the first two months she attended the meetings, but then she started opening up, and her communication continued to improve.

At her psychologist's recommendation, she also applied and was accepted to an intensive pilot program for aphasia. Mary also learned how to take care of herself all over again: tying her shoes, taking a bath, cracking an egg—only using her left hand. After four years of adaptive driving lessons, Mary got her driver’s license back. And a teacher and students launched an online campaign to raise money to outfit her house so she could return to the second floor of her home—which she hadn’t done since her stroke. Now she has a chairlift that takes her upstairs so she can utilise her entire home.

5. Technology can change your life

Mary was always into computers, but after her stroke, she learned the power of technology could transform lives. While she was in the intensive aphasia program, students asked her if she would like to participate in a new program. When Mary got home from working with her speech pathologist, she would use the program app on her iPad and do additional exercises.

6. How to keep sight of your dreams

Mary hardly took days off when she was teaching, so she had about two years of leave built up when she had her stroke. She used that time to recover, but as she became more confident, she couldn’t wait to get back to teaching. Mary focused on getting better, even if she might never be 100% again, volunteering two days a week with an after-school program. “I did that for a year, and I thought, if I can help kids with homework, I think I can be a teacher again,” Borrelli says.

In addition to her degrees in education and educational administration, Mary had also taken a lot of classes in English Language Learners over the years, since there were a lot of students in her district for whom English is not their first language. And that’s who she’s been teaching since she returned to the classroom full-time.

“Now I have an appreciation of what the kids go through that first year because it’s new to them,” Borrelli says. “Just like speaking again was new to me after my stroke.”