Debra Meyerson began Labor Day weekend 2010 as an accomplished Stanford professor, wife and busy mother of three. She ended that Tahoe holiday paralyzed and in the ICU.
Meyerson, then 53, had suffered a stroke that initially left the right side of her body immobilized. Her mind was still working, but she was unable to speak.
What followed was a nearly nine-year journey to rediscover her sense of self, when she could no longer easily talk, teach or be as active and independent as she once was — a daunting quest for identity that inspired her just-published book, “Identity Theft: Rediscovering Ourselves After Stroke” (Andrews McMeel Publishing).
Her book comes mere months after the high-profile, stroke-related deaths of actor Luke Perry and director John Singleton. Like Meyerson, Perry and Singleton were in their 50s, and their deaths demonstrate all too clearly that strokes don’t just happen to people who are older or in poor health.
Each year, some 800,000 people experience a stroke in the United States — for 140,000 of them, it’s fatal. The rest are left with disabilities that range from mild to profound. The release of Meyerson’s book coincides with Stroke Awareness Month.
When it happened to her, Meyerson — once an avid runner, skier and sailor — had to learn to walk again. She still moves with a limp and has never regained the use of her right hand. She can dress, feed and drive herself, but she needs help with specific tasks, like contact lenses. Her husband, Steve Zuckerman, puts them in for her. And continuing aphasia means she still has difficulty speaking.
It’s evident when she searches for words during an interview in her Portola Valley home. When the words won’t come, Steve gently offers to translate her responses.
“Really frustrating!” Meyerson says of her aphasia.
“I can’t think of any two words she says with greater ease,” Steve says, as Meyerson nods and smiles.
Meyerson’s speech difficulties eventually forced her to give up her professorship in Stanford’s schools of education and business, a teaching and writing role that had long shaped her identity.
“The stroke took away my capacity to work as I did before, many of my abilities and many of the other pieces of the life I had built over five decades,” Meyerson said in her book.
Rebuilding identity is a major challenge for a lot of stroke survivors, Meyerson notes, but it’s not an issue commonly addressed among doctors and therapists, who mostly focus on patients’ physical recovery.
Meyerson had little warning. She had just dropped off her younger son Adam, who was starting college in Boston. She was gearing up for a busy year of teaching, when she joined Steve and their other children, Danny and Sarah, for a few days of relaxation at Lake Tahoe.
Meyerson says her first symptom was a “weird” feeling in her right leg that she noticed on the drive to the mountains. Then came a headache that a hike, aspirin and a night’s sleep couldn’t alleviate. And then a “slow fall from a cliff” into paralysis. Doctors said the stroke had been caused by a tear — or dissection — in her cerebral carotid artery, restricting blood flow from the heart to the brain, but they’re not sure why the tear happened in the first place.
As Meyerson became conscious of her condition in the ICU, she wondered whether dying would have been preferable. Fortunately, Meyerson and her husband say, those thoughts were fleeting. “Denial” became an ally, bolstering a stubborn belief that she would one day return to her old self, if she worked hard enough in physical and speech therapy.
After she had to give up her professorship, Meyerson realized that denial was holding her back from accepting that a full recovery might never happen. She let herself mourn all the things she could no longer do, celebrated the parts of herself that remained unchanged and forged a new sense of self.
In her book, Meyerson says she still misses certain conversations with her family, friends and former colleagues because the words don’t come fast enough. Lingering aftereffects make it difficult to write more than a few sentences at a time; Danny co-authored her book.
For a time, Meyerson worried that the stroke had kept her from being a good mother to Sarah, who was in high school at the time of the stroke. But Meyerson is proud of the way Sarah “grew up fast.” Sarah, she added, was the first to notice that her mother’s post-stroke self is less stressed than when she was juggling her Stanford career and everything else. She laughs more, too.
But a key quality Meyerson never lost was her intellectual curiosity, which pushed her to learn all she could about her condition, seek out other survivors and eventually decide that her story might be useful to other people — an extension, she says, of her lifelong goal to “spread knowledge.”
“That’s what led her to be a professor in the first place,” Steve says. “Is she still a professor? No, in that sense you could say she’s different. But she found a way to do what’s most important to her.”
And her voice comes through clearly in the book: “There are ways in which I feel even closer to my family, and we were very close before.” Having a stroke “still sucks,” Meyerson writes, but “the life I have made for myself since my stroke is a good and full life.”
