My memory hadn't been affected, and I knew why I was in hospital. I'd been at Waterloo Station, on my way home from work, when I suddenly felt a dreadful pain across my chest. The manager above the platform saw what was happening and, thank goodness, called an ambulance.
I couldn't speak, and the paramedic who raced down the platform immediately gave me aspirin - to thin my blood and prevent a blood clot - and also gave me oxygen, quite possibly saving my life.
I was taken to accident and emergency at St Thomas' Hospital, where I was told I'd had a heart attack and underwent an emergency bypass. Two days later, I had a stroke - a blood clot travelled up from my heart into my brain.
The stroke killed off some of the brain cells in the left side of my brain - the side dealing with language, reading and writing. This was why language suddenly became unintelligible to me. My wife Pat was told so many nerve cells had been damaged, the likelihood was I would never speak.
Of course, I was unaware of this as I lay in my bed, my brain in a whirl. I only managed to pick up a few words from the doctor, such as 'speak' and 'again' but, from the look on his and my wife's face, I knew exactly what he had said.
A surge of determination rose inside me - I was going to prove him wrong. I was filled with resolution. I knew my brain and memory were working - I just couldn't speak intelligibly. Bizarrely, it was nouns I completely lost.
I spent about five weeks in hospital, and began having speech therapy. We use only ten per cent of our brain's capacity, so I deduced that it must be possible to re-educate the brain to learn language.
I got hold of a dictionary and began writing out lists of words. I knew the words in my head, but I could not articulate them myself or understand them when other people were saying them to me.
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