As this blog heads ever closer towards collecting 1,000 page views since I began writing in mid-December, it's starting to dawn on me that the wider world might just be interested in my story and how I have got where I am. The day after I write this, I am hopeful that my local paper, the Tamworth Herald, will carry a story about me while next Monday (March 9) a photographer from the Derby Telegraph is due to be present as Emily Smedley of breathebalancebeactivated.com puts me through my regular hour of torture and agony on her treatment table.
And it's not just newspapers. I was sitting doing nothing in particular yesterday afternoon, as us strokies have to do on occasion to preserve our energy, when my mobile rang and a producer from my local BBC radio station asked to speak to me. He'd heard about my story from a friend who works there and decided I was a good subject for a feature on their late-night show.
Unlike their BBC counterparts on Radio 5 Live, who set up live interviews all over the place and drop most of them when a 'better' story comes along, this will be pre-recorded and kept 'in the can' for a couple of weeks until an opportunity for broadcast presents itself.
It's a big chance for me to tell my story to a wider audience, to heighten stroke-awareness even more and to generate interest in the work I do making people aware of stroke; that it doesn't just catch old people (yet again this morning, I heard "You don't look old enough to have had a stroke''), that it can sometimes be a silent illness in that survivors can be brain-damaged but look healthy and that it changes lives in an instant.
I haven't yet worked out what I'm going to say but my journalism training tells me that I will need to have something ready to say and then say it at every opportunity.
No doubt the interview will feature in this blog next week. What is likely to feature in this blog in two weeks' time is the 'Warrior' tattoo which I've decided to have done for my birthday (which birthday? Mind your own business, LOL) on March 18. Designed by a young stroke-survivor who has become a close friend of mine in the last few months and who only recently celebrated her 18th birthday, it will highlight my journalistic background alongside my life as a stroke-survivor. Featuring a pot of ink, a quill and a scroll of paper, it will say: "I fight for my health every day in ways most people don't understand. I'm not lazy. I'm a warrior"
Apt, don't you think?
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