Brigid Keenan

A stroke in Sri Lanka

Sitting at the dinner table, I suddenly couldn’t make any sense. And then the nightmare began

This time last year, it seemed that life couldn’t get much better for me: I had a new book out to appreciative reviews, had just returned from a literary festival in Mumbai and was en route to a few more, in Galle, Jaipur and Lahore.

The Galle festival is small and cosy — a little paradise of sun and sea and authors and books — and I loved my first event, with the lively Sri Lankan writer Ashok Ferrey. Afterwards, signing books, I had a bad headache but I took a paracetamol and tried to ignore it. That night, there was a big dinner organised by Geoffrey Dobbs, the man who started the festival (and who owns several of Sri Lanka’s nicest hotels). Everyone was chatting around the long table and I said something to Christina Lamb, the chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Times. But as the sentence left my lips I was aware that it was a meaningless string of words and made absolutely no sense. I tried saying ‘I’m so sorry I don’t know why I said that,’ but the same thing happened, and Christina said to AW (as I call my husband): ‘I think Brigid is having a stroke.’

Geoffrey Dobbs leapt into action and dispatched his hotel manager with AW and me, all squashed together in a two-seater tuk-tuk, to the hospital. They had more or less shut up for the night, but they took my blood pressure (extraordinarily high) and said come back tomorrow.

Next morning, two young lads turned up at the hotel with an ambulance to take me back. Over that day, lots of tests were done. The hospital — apparently a private one — was packed with patients; when they did an ultrasound scan of my neck arteries I was huddled on a bench surrounded by dozens of people waiting and watching.

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