The true story of a television broadcaster learning to speak again after an unexpected stroke. Andrea Vianello tells the story of a stroke—his own stroke.
It was a cerebral ischemia affecting the left side of the brain, caused by a carotid artery dissection. A brilliant emergency operation managed to keep him among the living, yet it could do nothing to undo the damage that had already spread. Suddenly, his words were lost. Although they remained clear and distinct in his mind, in practice, they emerged in total confusion and random, jumbled phonemes. It is a terrifying prospect for anyone, but even more so for a man who had built both his identity and his career around speaking.
Every Word I Knew is a journey into a widespread hell—that of a stroke and its aftereffects. This book recounts and demonstrates how Vianello managed to recover all the words he once knew. He even added new words to his vocabulary. Words that tell of the personal ordeal of discovering one’s own physical vulnerability; words describing the unsettling experience of shifting from the glare of TV studio spotlights to the harsh hospital lights of the public healthcare system. It is a comprehensive, moving, and wryly humorous book that chronicles the everyday yet inevitable courage of someone suddenly forced to reevaluate what’s important in their life.
