What me? A Stroke? ...Nah!: NICK JAMES

By Nick James

This is a journey.

To take a young boy through private school, cheffings, dancing, guitar, self-employed, marriage breakdown, Jerez, back to work, second marriage, ATT, Managing Director and then the heights of success until. . . he had a stroke. What happens after it is quite incredible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: What me? a stroke. . .nah
• Release date: Sep 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781838215934

Nick James

In a beautiful ski resort in France, Nick James and his daughter were having a lovely time together, but what happened next is gruesome, sad and unhappy. Then, the world outside of West Sussex as a disabled man, of instance, Jerez, Greece and Australia . . .

Book preview

Nick James

IN DECEMBER 2011 Nick James, a successful 44-year-old careerist and his six year old daughter flew to L’Alpe d’Huez, a skiing resort in south-eastern France to enjoy an exciting holiday-break together.

The fourth and final day of the trip Nick was to suffer a shattering stroke.

Not only did this event cause him considerable physical disability, it also destroyed his tax knowledge career, his brilliant flamenco guitar playing, his marriage, and cost him the loss of his children whom he adores, while also introducing him to the seemingly inexplicable hostile reaction of his ex-wife and subsequent unpleasant behaviour towards him while it was nine months after he had a stroke.

Preface

I KNEW THERE WAS TO BE A LONG, long haul ahead.

Nine agonising years of it long, in fact. . .

. . . when, to quote Matthias in Monty Python’s Life of Brian - My legs are grey. My ears are gnarly. My eyes are old and bent.

Post the occurrence of my ‘traumatic event’ my head has been crammed with nonsensical thoughts, all rushing about rebounding off each other, screaming for the release of expression through some creative medium, essentially by being written about, but my right leg and arm have been left numb and my right, my ‘pen’ hand unable to oblige either. Right-handed, I have had to learn to write/ type with my left, so it’s taken me quite a while to get here.

After my experience, being able now, at last, to have recorded the events that took place has proven a cathartic exercise for me, and – I hope – will be an interesting one for my reader to learn about.

The bottom line is that at the age of forty-four in the midst of a successful career I was felled by a debilitating stroke, which my then wife couldn’t ‘take’ (‘I didn’t signed up for this" she said) so ‘arranged’ for me to ‘depart the premises’ whilst keeping my son and daughter with her and for some reason then opted to sour their minds against me. I adored my children, but in spite being legally entitled to do so, I am nevertheless the ‘black sheep’ of the family, access to them, purely by the deviousness of the mother destruction ‘machinations’. A simple yarn, old as the sands of time and oft repeated. But every tale is different . . .

. . . and I would like to relate how it has been so in my case.

I said no ‘public revelation vengeance’, but to record some of the repercussions that can ensue after a setback such as mine.

Amongst his other publications, Paul McKenna has written books entitled I Can Make You Rich, I Can Make You Thin and I Can Make You Happy but he has not yet written I Can Make You Forget, which I often wish he had. It would mean forgetting all the wonderful times we enjoyed as a family, my wife and me and our son and daughter, but hopefully, it would also erase the constant recollection of the aftermath.

The stroke, when it ‘hit’ me – which you will come to read about in graphic detail – was an absolutely gruesome and terrifying experience. From that moment on I was forcefully reverted to becoming nothing short of a babe in arms once more. In hindsight it was fascinating to reflect on how my body had ‘fought back’ and striven to cope. From being reduced to a little short of a gibbering jelly, via beds, wheelchair, callipers, stick, a light calliper, speech therapy (to combat my attendant aphasia), from those dark days of being unable to walk, talk or use my right arm, I now feel ‘much improved’. I remember with Roxana Steedman and Jacqui Budd, in the middle of winter, going for a beer. It was lovely to see the two of them but I can’t express anything, sitting in the pub like a vegetable, wheeling him in with a pork scratchings. My right leg and arm are still ‘pretty gimpish’ and I suffer partially restricted vision in my right eye. Clearly I shall never be 100% again. The last time I went for a run was nine years ago. On a scale of 1 to 10, the stroke’s aftermath then reduced me to being in a ‘one’. Since then, I have now graduated to becoming a five.

But, what an amazing journey it has been. . .

. . . good and bad . . . encompassing terror, anger, recuperation, reconstruction, the magistrates’ court, Spain, Greece, cruises – then Australia, twice. You couldn’t make it up.

Here, I am now going to give the strongest ‘plug’ for something that I have ever given in my entire life, a plug which I hope and pray you might heed. It is a plug for a commodity that was heaven-sent to me;

CRITICAL ILLNESS

If I had not taken out a Critical Illness Insurance Policy when I did, for the past nine years and the rest of my life, as the result of my setbacks I would probably have been sitting unshaven on a piece of cardboard selling ‘The Big Issue’ in a shop doorway. Instead, apart from the deprivations imposed by my stroke, which are time-consumingly awful, I now enjoy a wonderful, phenomenal and sensational life. There is still partying and new adventures to be had, love on the horizon (I doubt it) and much more, but without my Critical Illness Cover all this would have been unattainable. I remember doing the mortgage in Church Avenue in Haywood Heath, and it said:

Tick the box to have a critical illness plan

(I don’t need to do this).

Tick the box to have a critical illness plan

(I’ll do it tomorrow).

"TICK THE BOX TO HAVE THE BLOODY CRITICAL ILLNESS PLAN!!!"

(.......Alright then)

Thirty-five quid a month it cost me (expensive at the time) but by God shall I be ever grateful that fate decided me to sign on the dotted line that day. From that day in the French Alps when I was struck down by my stroke, the insurance company had paid, now pays and will continue to pay me £3,000, index-linked, each month until I attain the age of sixty.

Don’t even think about it. Critical Illness Insurance. Do it now, right this moment, go and get yourself a new, shiny and delightful Critical Illness Policy.

Showtime. . .

1

Me, Myself & I

IF MY LIFE was absolutely normal, it would be fantastic.

My Monday to Friday diary might then read thus: worked really hard; showered and dressed; had breakfast; took the kids to school, more work; had lunch; picked the kids up from school; home-work; dinner for the kids then dinner for you and me; wind down after a tiring day, yet there’s still the ironing, vacuuming and dusting to be done . . .

. . . but that was ‘then’.

The other ‘then’ was my professional life. Just in one day in the City you could be millions of pounds in debt or millions in profit, you never got to see your kids, and more often than not you worked on Saturdays, feverishly so, because having noted your potential ‘the boss’ had ‘plans’ for you, which you didn’t want to blow.

Own time? Maybe the occasional (a rarity) 9-5, or what seemed like the middle of the night, when you could pursue your other interests, such as in my case ballroom dancing, art classes, football, opera — or simply nipping down to the pub for a quick one.

Pressure?

In retrospect there can be no doubt that my imminent forthcoming life-changing catastrophe, and it was to be an immense, massive and humongous reckoning, already lay primed and waiting in the wings.

By Saturday (if it was one of those I had off) I had my work cut out. The children may have had sport that weekend, either Flamenco or ballet for Jill; Jack, my son, he was tiny, but for me or in my case horse-riding and golf. I loved our life. My daughter, Jill was at private school, the pinnacle of her then achievements, aged only six. I was so proud, seeing her standing there in the classroom in her school uniform and blazer. There were sixteen children in her class, all of them full of nervous excitement. I recalled the excitement I had felt when first attending my own private Forest School. This had soon quickly changed to an atmosphere of fear when it became a testosterone-charged zoo of boys intent on beating each other up, or employing desperate tactics in the attempt to avoid being beaten up. There were three ‘bullies’ in particular I spent my waking hours trying to by-pass. I did not enjoy or understand the school curriculum either, and I hated football, cricket, hockey but I did like squash, so for those formative five years of my life, I was mostly pretty much panic-stricken. Although I did especially enjoy playing the guitar, and music generally, which I could read as easily as though it was a newspaper. And I thoroughly enjoyed being a member of the Army Cadet Force, for which on Sundays I would happily press my uniform trousers in readiness for the next week’s parade. My beret I used to wear in a louche French Foreign Legion style, with its badge hanging half above my left ear. The uniform and entire ‘military’ ethos were just what I sought: they represented order. We were issued with old WWII short-muzzled .303 Lee-Enfield rifles and Bren Light Machine Guns, kept securely locked in the armoury until drawn for parades. Each summer we would perform manoeuvres (of sorts) when we would lie camouflaged behind bushes, then leap out across the cricket field to attack the opposing force, hurling smoke grenades and firing blanks at each other. It was all great fun and generated bags of swank and pride.

In the forest in Germany

Highlights were trips to the regular army at Ripon in Yorkshire (where I remember doing guard duty ‘stag’ from