Mark McEwen - After the Stroke: My Journey Back to Life

Table of Contents

[After the Stroke is] a heartwarming tale of triumph against overwhelming odds. For anyone who has suffered a stroke or knows someone who has, Marks words will make them laugh and cry, but mostly will give them hope.

George H. W. Bush, 41st President of the United States

Mark McEwen is one of Americas great communicators. Read this book and youll learn about the adventures of morning television, but youll also find out how love and hard work brought a man who almost died back to life.

Harry Smith, anchor of The Early Show on CBS

For the six million stroke survivors in this country, this is a book about humility, dignity, courage, and never giving up. For the caregivers, it is a book about the trials and tribulations you have come to know all too well, and you will realize you are not alone. For the rest of us, it is a book about what you can do to save a life, including your own.

James Baranski, CEO of the National Stroke Association

This is a must-read for stroke survivors and their medical and non-medical care providers.

Edgar J. Kenton III, M.D., FAHA, FAAN, former chair of the Stroke Medical Advisory Committee, American Stroke Association/American Heart Association

McEwen was voted one of the most trusted people in America.... His wit and warmth made him a welcome guest in millions of homes. The stroke almost took all that away [but] today he has a new mission.CBS.com

Mark McEwen was a fixture on CBSs The Early Show from 1987 to 2002, and also worked as a correspondent on the prime-time news magazine 48 Hours. At the time of his stroke, he was an anchor at WKMG-TV in Orlando. He lives in Central Florida with his family. Visit www.markmcewen.com

When the world says, Give up, Hope whispers, Try it one more time.

author unknown

This is a book about stroke. Specifically, its about a massive stroke I suffered on Tuesday, November 15, 2005, on a plane home to Orlando, Florida, from Baltimore/ Washington International. This massive stroke followed a smaller stroke two days earlier that left me feeling weak and nauseated. Those symptoms drove me to an emergency room visit at a Baltimore-area hospital, where a doctor misdiagnosed me with the stomach flu, sent me home, and told me to get some rest and drink plenty of fluids.

Its also a book about me. People say you should write what you know. I know me, and I know stroke. This strikes me as funny, because up until a couple years ago I didnt know the first thing about stroke. I didnt know the second thing either. To be sure, I knew about mebut you could have barely filled a thimble with what I knew about stroke. Now I travel the country giving speeches to stroke survivors and their caregivers and families. I talk about warning signs and treatment options and aftercare considerations. Mostly I talk about how I survived my own stroke with the support and encouragement of my family and friends and therapists, but before I get to that happy ending I talk about how I naively followed that emergency room doctors advice and did as I was told. I talk about some of the horror stories Ive collected along the way, and how misdiagnosis and misinformation seem to play a role in a lot of stroke cases. Its like the opposite of that old maxim, What you dont know cant hurt you. With stroke, its more like, What you dont know can hurt you. Heck, it can kill you. It nearly killed me.

A lot of the folks I talk to recognize me from television. They see someone they invited into their homes over breakfast, or into their bedrooms as they got dressed for work. They remember the long career I enjoyed at CBS News, first as a morning show weatherman and later as an entertainment reporter and eventually as a coanchor. Some of them remember how I spun a pie-in-the-sky, seat-of-the-pants turn as a stand-up comedian into a viable run as a rock n roll radio disc jockey and then into a long-running gig as a network news personality. Of course, they want to hear about my experience with stroke, thats the baseline for our visit, but they want to hear about it from a familiar face. While were at it, they also want to hear about the unlikely career I managed to build at CBS; the front-row seat it provided to world events like the Olympic Games, political conventions, and Super Bowls; and the lasting friendships it helped me to forge with people like country music superstar Garth Brooks, singing legend Tony Bennett, my boyhood idol, Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson, and President George H. W. Bush. Ironically, it was President Bush who signed the bill designating the month of May as National Stroke Awareness Month, back in 1989, more than fifteen years before I could recognize its importance.

Its all tied together, the life I lived before my stroke and the life Im living now, and I believe this is an important point. It reminds people that the lives they lived before stroke will come back to them in time, and it reinforces that stroke doesnt discriminate. It doesnt care about race or class or religion. It doesnt care if youve had a long career in morning television or an anonymous career behind the scenes. It cares only about risk factors like high blood pressure and cholesterol and obesity, and whether or not you smoke or drink or exercise regularly.

Ill write more about these risk factors a bit later on in these pages. For now, let me get back to me for a moment, to help set my rehabilitation and recovery in a kind of context. What a lot of people dont remember is that when I worked at CBS I made most of my living in harms way. For fifteen years, I was the guy the producers asked to do the stunts. Before me, network morning shows featured weathermen, like my good friend Willard Scott, who were known for dressing in silly or outrageous outfits, or for saying silly or outrageous things. After me they had to go out and do stuff. And not just any stuff. It had to be exciting, perilous stuff. At first it just had to be silly or outrageousto match the outfits and the outbursts, I guessbut then it had to be stuff any rational person wouldnt even consider doing.

By the end of my long tenure at CBS, I was probably the only on-air network news personality with a reckless en dangerment clause in his contract that actually required him to risk his life. This is a joke, of course, but its rooted in truth. I should know, because I was the guy they sent parasailing in ripping winds. (I almost drowned when they finally brought me down.) I was the guy they put in the air show plane, or in the race car, or at the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa for no apparent reason other than it looked a little thrilling and seemed like a good idea. I was the guy who emerged from a coffin to the music of The Phantom of the Opera to open our Halloween show one year. I was the guy they put in a barrel in the middle of a bullring in Jack-son, Mississippi, while a rodeo clown baited a not-too-happy bull into charging me. (It might as well have been another coffin.) I was the guy who rode the runaway dog-sled in Lillehammer, Norway, that careened out of control. I was Walter Mitty, with protective gear.