One morning, there was a cramp in my neck. It exists in shards of memory, disjointed, cobbled together with the help of others. I donвЂ™t remember much about the days leading up to my hospital stay, or the hospital itself, or even the next year. A few days later, I lost the ability to read. What had caused it? How could it happen to me at just 29 years old? The answers that came would change my life. I struggled to lift my head off the pillow while a blood clot the size of a small egg had taken residence behind my left ear. Pain, tests, and unanswered questions had become our new intimacy. I was in the best shape of my life.ДЄnd yet, less than week after my trail run, he and I were greeting the sunrise from the intensive care unit. I had just returned from a trip home to Trinidad and Tobago, where my fiancГ© had proposed, his feet buried in the sand, his solid frame backlit by the setting Caribbean sun.

Not even a headache was going to stop me.Д«ut inside the recesses of my brain, blood was congealing beneath the temporal bone at my left ear, a dam ready to burst, the viscous jelly blocking the blood flow and starving my brain of the oxygen that kept me alive and sentient.ДЄs I ran, breathing to the rhythm of my footfalls, only a fraction of the oxygen I inhaled was actually making it to my brain. I was betting that grit would carry me all the way to a half-marathon. I was not the fastest runner, but I was a determined one, panting my way through, willing my legs to take me to the next mile marker. I picked the Florida trail that wended its way through the trees along an abandoned railroad spur. The throbbing ache in my head was just a couple of days old when I decided to go for a run.

Massive stroke on left side of brain