Surviving a Stroke--and Its Aftermath

MY YEAR OFF

Recovering a Life After a Stroke

By Robert McCrum

Broadway Books, 239 pages, $13

British editor and novelist Robert McCrum had his life turned upside down when he suffered a stroke at 42.

The massive cerebral hemorrhage that left him paralyzed on his left side propelled him on an unguided journey into how to have a meaningful life without the physical strength he’d always taken for granted. The episode and its aftermath also fueled a desire to share that experience for the benefit of others in similar straits.

One day in July 1995, McCrum was the globe-hopping London-based editor in chief of the publishing house Faber & Faber, newly married to Sarah Lyall, a writer for the New York Times. The next day, he couldn’t get out of bed.

This sensitively written volume intersperses dated diary entries from both McCrum and Lyall that trace their individual disappointments, fears, observations about medical treatment and reflections on what proves to be a highly resilient marriage.

McCrum includes highly accessible information about his stroke, a “brain attack” that left him feeling detached from his own body for months, and how he came to terms with its devastating effects, some of which persist today.

More than that, though, the book is a testament to how love and support can bring about psychological healing.

And in an afterword to the newly released paperback version of the 1998 hardcover edition, McCrum writes about how a brush with mortality turned him into “an involuntary representative of that world of the shivery hush that precedes the arrival of the coffin.”

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THE RELAXATION RESPONSE

By Dr. Herbert Benson

Avon Books, 179 pages, $12.50

Herbert Benson, a Harvard physician and researcher who has long focused on mind-body connections, has updated and added an extensive introduction to his bestselling 1975 volume, which said we are all victims of stress but that we are all capable of reducing it with something he termed the “relaxation response.”

In his new introduction, Benson notes that despite advances in recognizing the important connections between the mind and body, the science of those connections “has yet to be incorporated as an equal, fully respected partner in Western medical disciplines.”

Because we’re conditioned for instant gratification and external answers to our problems, he says, Americans today remain more willing to pop a pill than take the time required to consider yoga, meditation or other stress-management techniques, even though such techniques can lower blood pressure, relieve headaches and chronic pain, and reduce anxiety and mild depression.

To elicit the “relaxation response,” Benson says, four elements are required: a quiet environment without distractions, a word or phrase you can repeat over and over again, adoption of a passive attitude that entails emptying your mind of intrusive thoughts or distractions, and a position (such as sitting) that you can comfortably assume for up to 20 minutes.

A quarter-century after he broke ranks with mainstream medicine to suggest that borrowing some of the meditation common in many religions actually has beneficial physiological effects, many studies have validated Benson’s contention that individuals can harness the power of their own bodies and minds to reverse some of the ravages of living in stressful times.