How a coughing fit gave me a STROKE at 45 and I feared I'd never talk again: There's an epidemic of young people having them... and now doctors are saying we all should know the warning signs
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Jennie Gow had to summon every last bit of strength as she tried to scribble a sentence on to the whiteboard her husband Jamie had brought into hospital to help her communicate. 'All I wanted to ask was 'how are you?',' she recalls. 'But it was painfully hard. It took a good 45 minutes.'.
![[Jennie, husband Jamie and daughter Isabelle. Today, Jennie doesn't remotely look like someone who has had a serious stroke]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/16/17/93202227-14198481-image-a-32_1734369666431.jpg)
Yet only a few weeks earlier, she had been trackside in Abu Dhabi as Formula 1 driver Max Verstappen claimed the 2022 championship title and another glamorous Formula 1 season came to a close. But just after Christmas, Jennie, then 45, had a stroke that partially paralysed her right side and – terrifyingly for a broadcast journalist – left her unable to speak.
![[Seven months after her stroke, Jennie did her first on-air interview with former champion Lewis Hamilton as the world of F1 stepped up with remarkable kindness to support her]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/16/17/93202233-14198481-image-a-33_1734369670650.jpg)
'In those first few days part of me thought I'd never be able to talk again,' she says. 'It was one of the loneliest, hardest things I've been through.'. The presenter, now 47, who hosts Radio 5 Live's F1 coverage and reports on the sport across the BBC, did find her voice again. But not without a struggle – throughout which, she says, the world of F1 stepped up with remarkable kindness to support her.
![[Jennie says she 'had to summon every last bit of strength' as she tried to scribble a sentence on to the whiteboard her husband Jamie had brought into hospital to help her communicate]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/16/17/93202237-14198481-image-m-37_1734369695914.jpg)
Today, Jennie doesn't remotely look like someone who has had a serious stroke – only the way she folds her right arm protectively over her chest, and an occasional hesitancy as she searches for a word, are clues to the catastrophe that befell her. 'I'm lucky I made a good recovery, but there are things I still struggle with – although I've got good at masking, so people don't really notice,' she says.
![[Jennie, now 47, hosts Radio 5 Live's F1 coverage and reports on the sport across the BBC, has found her voice again]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/16/17/93202281-14198481-image-a-35_1734369684582.jpg)
