Broadcaster Mark Cagney has revealed that he suffered a stroke earlier this year.

On The Hard Shoulder this evening, Mark said he went to hospital after suffering two black outs in a short space of time.

He said he dealt with anxiety and depression in the weeks after – but he was speaking out to remind people that there is life after suffering a stroke.

    

Mark said the stroke hit on January 8th this year and the first thing he noticed was a "a really strange buzzing, kind of white noise, in my head."

He said he started having difficulty with depth perception while driving to the local supermarket and, when he got inside he found himself bumping into things.

It was while he was talking to a shop assistant that his symptoms got serious.

“I said, ‘thank you very much’ and turned to walk away and then the room just went completely 180 degrees on me,” he said. “Bang, I blacked out, collapsed, dropped.

“I didn’t topple but I went straight down on my knees and the next thing I remember is a man leaning over me saying, ‘are you alright, are you having chest pains.

“I said, no it’s not that. I know what heart attack protocols are, it’s not that, it is in my head.”

Mark's daughter picked him up from the supermarket and when he got home he had another incident.

“I lay down on the couch; we were talking away and the next thing, she was leaning over me going ‘Dad, Dad, Dad are you OK’ and I thought, ‘what? I must have nodded off’ and she said, ‘no, you were gone again. If you were standing up, you would have fallen again.’

‘So, at that stage, I am thinking what the hell is going on and there are all sorts of possibilities running through your head.’

Hospital

It was the next morning at Beaumont Hospital that he was told what had happened.

"They came and said, you have had a pulmonary embolism, which is a clot on your lung,” he said.

“I thought, ‘OK, it could have been worse but why am I in a stroke ward?’”

“He said, ‘because what you described to us does not compute with what we have seen so far.’

“Then they did brain MRIs and they discovered I had had a stroke and possibly two strokes with effectively a small clot, thank god, in a large vessel.

"If it was the other way around, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

Mark said his initial feeling in the weeks after the stroke was one of gratitude.

“I spent the better part of three weeks in an acute stroke unit in Beaumont,” he said. “I saw the range of options and alternatives there could have been."

"Not dead yet"

He said he chose to speak out about the experience to show that there is life after stroke.

“Part of coming in here was because I want to tell people, I am not dead yet,” he said. “I am still standing, I am still swinging, I am still going.

“As far as I can tell, I am pretty much the old me. I am not firing on all cylinders totally yet but that will come.

“But also, to say to anybody else out there who is going through the same thing, you are not dead either.

“It isn’t over. You have survived and there has to be a reason for that. Either you have done something very right or you still have something to do.”

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