It was over lunch with a colleague that Jonathan Hirons began to feel a bit strange. “I couldn’t quite catch what was going on,” he says, “and my words started to go.” Back in the office where he was having meetings, another colleague showed him a document Hirons had worked on and asked him to change something in it. “And I couldn’t.”
He doesn’t remember much of the rest of that day in London in January 2019. “I was just confused; I didn’t know what was going on,” he says. An ambulance was called and he was taken to University College hospital, where doctors suspected a stroke. A CT scan that afternoon, and an MRI the following day, confirmed a blood vessel had burst in his brain. “The bleed was quite short, which was lucky,” says Hirons. He wasn’t left with any physical problems, but he did have aphasia – a loss of language.
