But the same distance that first day with the physio took 10 minutes. “Ironically, the first day we covered about 200 metres – having been the world record-holder at that event, it wasn’t the most positive thing.” He had clocked 19.32 seconds while breaking the world record in Atlanta. Johnson half-laughs, half-winces at the memory. The first stage of his recovery involved a physiotherapist helping him to learn to walk again using a walking frame. It was an arduous process, both physically and mentally. He brought a touch of his famous self-confidence to bear, too, telling Armine not only that he would recover, but that he would do it faster than anyone had done it before. Johnson decided to put the same determination that he had brought to his athletics career into recovering from his stroke. I was pretty fortunate to get past that situation, with an opportunity to completely recover, which is what I hoped to do.”
“It’s natural for anyone to go through that period of anger. “I did feel like: ‘Why did this happen to me, when I was doing all the right things?’” But within 24 hours he had gained a different perspective. Initially, Johnson was angry angry that someone as determinedly clean-living as himself, with no obvious risk factors – he didn’t smoke, ate healthily, kept fit and had no family history of cardiovascular disease – had suffered a stroke. “It took a while for that to actually sink in,” he says. Now he was having to come to terms with the fact that recovery from stroke is variable and not guaranteed. He became the poster boy of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta after triumphing over both distances in custom-made golden spikes. In the 1990s, Johnson was the fastest man in history over 200 and 400 metres. “It made me feel – it’s hard to describe – just afraid and scared, and wondering what my future was going to be.” “They said: ‘Because you’re in good shape and got here quickly, that improves your chances, but only time will tell.’” The doctors’ uncertainty about how well and how quickly he would recover was shocking, he says.
His sudden helplessness prompted him to start asking a lot of difficult questions: what was his life going to be like now? Would he be able to dress himself? Would he need others to look after him? Would he recover – and how long would that take?įrustratingly for Johnson, the medical team could not provide the clarity he wanted. The stroke had occurred deep in the right side of his brain, in an area called the thalamus – a thalamic or lacunar stroke, in medical jargon. Johnson – an athlete once so supreme that he was known as Superman – was now enfeebled. The numbness in my left arm had increased significantly and I couldn’t feel the two smallest fingers of my left hand. I couldn’t stand or put any weight on my left leg. “I’d been able to get off my bed, and on to the MRI table myself – but when the MRI ended 30 minutes later, I could no longer walk. A CT scan, then an MRI confirmed the ER doctor’s diagnosis of a stroke. Armine drove him to the Emergency Room at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, 20 minutes from their home in Malibu. “There was no jolting moment that made me think: ‘I’m having a stroke.’ And I think that’s one of the things that makes it so potentially dangerous.”Īfter half an hour spent wondering what to do, Johnson decided to go to hospital. “I experienced no pain,” he says, in a deep drawl reflecting his Texan roots. Many stroke victims do not realise at first that they are experiencing an event that could leave them dead or seriously disabled, potentially for life. The confusion he felt was fairly typical, he points out now, eight months later, on the phone from his home in California.
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