Publisher's Synopsis
The frank, unapologetic memoir about a woman's struggle to start again after a devastating stroke.
Stacie Broek was living the expat dream--three children in a central Tokyo private school, house and travel back home all paid for--until the morning when her carotid artery spontaneously ripped, causing blood to pool in her artery wall. Upon waking from a ten-hour surgery, Stacie couldn't walk, talk or feed herself. She couldn't remember her name, her children's names, or her own address. The new ignorance was menacing and dangerous. This once independent, full-of-moxie woman was reduced to a needy lump. Driven by instinct, Stacie threw off the shackles of expectation and forged ahead with blind fierceness. She defied the white coats and bulldozed her husband... along with anyone who told her no. While her neurosurgeons tried to insist that she follow their advice, she broke all of the rules, from sneakily trying to walk by herself to rejecting the rehabilitation centers that the doctors pushed her towards. From the outside, she appeared brash, reckless and out of her mind. That deepened the divide between her and everyone who was sucked into the stroke-abyss with her. Still, she was relentlessly determined to find her own way forward. In a brutally honest, sometimes raw, introspective narrative, Stacie takes her readers on a harrowing emotional journey through the destruction that the stroke wreaked on her... and how she clung to her steadfast belief that she could use it as her impetus for change.A stirring journey of the heart and soul, (al)ONE is both a heartbreaking testament to what it means to be lost inside trauma, and a call-to-action for those who are suffering.
