A Stroke Survivor's Story

In February 2019 I tore a vertebral artery skiing in Japan. I was twenty-nine.

A week later, I had my stroke in a remote fishing village outside of Hong Kong, during Chinese New Year. A rickshaw and two ambulance rides got me to a hospital where I did not speak the language and nobody could tell me what I would get back. Eventually, I was told recovery would largely depend on neuroplasticity, which at the time meant little to me – specifically because I asked if there was anything that would support that, with no answer.

Home in Colorado I did “the work” – speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and about a year of trying everything else I could find (lots of Lego’s).

Some of it helped. I got most everything back. The part I was not ready for came later, one nobody told me about.

After I stopped “seeming” like I had a stroke, on the inside I was still tired in a way nobody could see, still losing words, still scared at night it’d happen again, and still trying to figure out what was normal.

That was the part of life after stroke I had no language for.

In September 2025 I had a carotid artery dissection and resulting TIA. I did the whole thing again – this time in my own country, in my own language, with insurance and a good doctor and every advantage I had not had the first time.

It was still lonely, and the same part was still missing.

That was the thing that reshaped my vision for PSI.

Not just the psychedelics.

The “Recovery Gap” and learning how to heal from a place of Wholeness.

The fact that I had now done this twice, in two countries, with two completely different levels of access, and both times the hardest stretch was the one with the least written down about it.

That is still what I mean when I talk about whole-person stroke recovery: getting function back matters. So do fear, identity, relationships, agency, meaning, and whether you can find your way back into your own life more powerful than before.