As she sat at her desk, Debbie Pearce felt worse for wear. It was 9am and at first she assumed she’d overindulged while celebrating her daughter’s birthday the night before. Yet Debbie, an administrator from Devon, began to sense that something was wrong – she’d had a strange sensation down her left side since getting up in the night with an urgent need for the loo.
‘Then I picked up a pen and what I wrote didn’t look like my handwriting,’ she recalls. ‘I’m a trained first aider so I knew what the signs were pointing to. I said to my colleague, “I’m too young to have a stroke, aren’t I?”.’ Debbie’s workmate wasn’t convinced and insisted on driving the 49-year-old to hospital. During the journey, a terrified Debbie wanted to speak, but the words wouldn’t come…