The stroke survivor in the Gulf region began cycling in cross-country

After a stroke in 2010, at the age of 53, Debra Myerson has learned to accept that she can no longer work, talk or be physically active the way she was before, but that hasn’t stopped her from move on.

The former Stanford professor, always an avid cyclist, admits that Type A is enough to find a way to embark on a 4,300-mile bike ride in the United States, despite her disabilities. She and her husband Steve Zuckerman started Stroke all over AmericaA 100-day road adventure to draw attention to the difficult challenges of stroke recovery.

Meyerson and Zuckerman, who is also her care partner, expect cycling across the country to be “difficult”, but they are also “many things worthwhile”, they said. in the column for the American Stroke Association.

“Rehabilitation is difficult,” they said. “It’s hard to stay positive. Navigating life with disabilities is difficult, especially in a world that, unfortunately, has not yet been built to house people with disabilities.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the United States understand these difficulties. Each year, about 800,000 people they have a stroke and 140,000 of them die. Those who survive are left with disabilities that range from mild to profound.

Myerson and Zuckerman’s ocean-to-ocean trip begins Thursday in Astoria, Oregon. It mostly follows the northern route through the mountains, the Midwest, around the Great Lakes, through upstate New York and in Boston.

The couple in the Portola Valley organized the trip as part of Stroke forward, a non-profit organization they founded about three years ago to help people recover emotionally from a stroke and rebuild their sense of identity. Myerson described her own difficult recovery from aphasia and other significant impairments in her 2019 book, Identity Theft: Rediscovering Yourself After a Stroke.

For their trip, the couple will use an adaptive bike that allows them to ride in tandem, with a front seat that allows Meyerson to ride the pedals more comfortably than lying down.

Covering an average of 50 to 60 miles a day, they will be joined by other survivors of stroke and traumatic brain injury for all or part of their journey. Their 15-month-old Goldendoodle, Rusti, will also be riding for parts of the trip and they will spend their nights sleeping in an accompanying RV.

In 15 cities along the route, the couple will participate in public events with local groups.

“It’s going to be a 50 percent holiday, a 50 percent information fair,” Zuckerman said.

They invite everyone to follow their trip online or to join the ride in person or virtually, through a special feature on their non-profit website. More information is on strokeonward.org.

In a sense, cycling is the culmination of Meyerson’s efforts to regain the most significant aspects of her once active and accomplished life as an academic and mother of three.

“This is emblematic of the road to recovery,” Zuckerman said in an interview. “In the book, we talked a lot about a deeper meaning and purpose. What do they really cost? Not the title. This is not the job, but what about it? For us, Deb loved to ride a bike. I loved riding a bike, we loved riding a bike together. We couldn’t do it the same way, so how do you adapt? How do you adapt so that you can do some of the things that you like and that make sense to you? ”

After Meyerson’s stroke in 2010, while on a family vacation in Tahoe, she feared she would lose the ability to do anything that gave her a sense of meaning and identity. The right side of her body was left motionless and she could not speak.

Meyerson, who also loved to run, ski, and sail, had to learn to walk again and regain the use of her right hand. Her continuing aphasia means she still has difficulty speaking. Her speech difficulties eventually forced her to resign from her teaching position at Stanford School of Education and Business, a teaching and writing role that has long shaped her identity.

“The blow took away my ability to work, as I did before, many of my abilities and many of the other parts of my life that I had built in five decades,” Meyerson said in her book, which was written with the help of her family.

Restoring identity is a big challenge for many stroke survivors, Meyerson said, but she and Zuckermann say it’s not a problem often seen among doctors and therapists who focus primarily on patients’ physical recovery.

That’s why she wrote her book. That’s why she and her husband started their non-profit organization and organized a bike ride.

“The more awareness we create, the more attention these issues will receive,” the couple wrote. “And that will help us reduce the incidence of stroke, improve interventions that minimize disability, and change the stroke care system to be more supportive of survivors and families in the coming decades.