ASHLAND – At the start of each new year, Teresa Smith selects one word and sets goals stemming from it. This year, her word is “strength.” For Smith, who survived a life-threatening stroke in Aug. 2018, strength relates to physical, emotional and spiritual growth.
Over hot drinks at Downtown Perk and Dessert Oasis in Ashland, Smith shared insights into her ongoing two-and-a-half-year journey from stroke survivor to wellness warrior.
Smith and her husband, Tom, arrived home from a trip to the grocery store one seemingly ordinary Sunday afternoon. When she went into the bathroom to wash her hands, their lives took a sudden turn.
“I looked up in the mirror as I’m rinsing my hands, and my face on the right side started to droop,” said Smith. “I called my husband and said, ‘Just keep an eye on this for me. It might be something, but it’s probably nothing.’ Before I finished that less-than-two-minute conversation, I could barely speak.”
In the whirlwind of events that followed, Smith’s husband drove her to a hospital three minutes from their home, and she received a CT scan within ten minutes of her initial observation of symptoms.
Scan results confirmed Smith was having a stroke, as she suspected based on her background as a medical assistant. The hospital was not equipped to help her, and she would need to be life flighted for treatment.
“What scared my husband the most was when they got ready to give me the drugs, before they shipped me out, the doctor came in and said, ‘You have to understand that from the moment we give you this drug, by the time you would get to Cleveland, there’s a six percent chance you have major bleeding and die before you get there,’” Smith said.
Strapped to a gurney and terrified of a helicopter crash more than anything else at that point, Smith was flown to Cleveland, and her husband followed on the road below.
With medical treatment, Smith survived, but she counts this as a remarkable blessing today. If her husband, a truck driver, had been hours away at work when her stroke began—or if the timing of events had been different at all—she might not be alive to tell her story today.
The following day, Smith was prescribed medication and discharged. She felt fatigued and a little fearful of what lay ahead, but she was equipped with a new sense of determination: she would do whatever possible to prevent this from happening again.
“I had none of the standard problems that would make you think I was a stroke candidate. My cholesterol was 147; my blood pressure was 90 over 60; my blood sugar was in the 80s and 90s,” Smith said.
Looking back, Smith now identifies several long-overlooked mental, social and physical health variables these numbers could not reveal, including childhood trauma, loneliness and an inactive routine.
From her earliest childhood memories, Smith recalls a life filled with stress and fear.
“I grew up in an extremely abusive environment. I was yelled at, screamed at, beaten, thrown through walls. It was not a good place for anybody,” Smith said.
On Sunday mornings as a little girl, Smith discovered she could stand at the end of her driveway and a church bus would pick her up to take her away from the chaos for a few hours of respite. Faith and spirituality became very important to her; years later, she met her husband at a ministry event while she was attending Bible school.
The extreme stress from violence followed Smith into adulthood when she moved from Cleveland to Akron to live with her husband. She recalls a time when bullets came through their living room walls. To this day, she jumps at the sound of fireworks.
Seeking a quieter place to live, Smith and her husband moved to Ashland in 2013. It was a new and unfamiliar place for them, selected for its proximity to work. She soon found herself socially isolated, separated from her former community and struggling to make friends in a new town.
“You know that sign on the highway, ‘Ashland, Ohio, World Headquarters of Nice People’?” Smith asked. “I didn’t find that to be the case when I moved here. I thought I would make friends easily. I thought I would meet people and get to know my neighbors, and I tried, but I eventually gave up.”
In the years leading up to her stroke, Smith lived a quiet and mostly sedentary life. She was retired from working as a medical assistant and dedicated her time to religious studies and ministering. Most of her days were spent at home, reading in an armchair.
But instead of returning to life as usual after she left the hospital, Smith committed to a full year focused exclusively on her health, not only with the goal of recovering from her stroke but also of improving beyond the starting point physically, emotionally and spiritually.
Before she would be able to help others again—as she had always loved to do—she would need to finally help herself.
In her search for a way to make an immediate lifestyle change, Smith saw a Facebook post from the local yoga studio, Rise Studios Wellness Collective, announcing an upcoming beginners’ class. Yoga sounded like a good place to begin adding activity into her routine.
Two weeks to the day after her stroke, Smith walked into the yoga studio to speak with the owner, Aubrey Bates.
“I introduced myself, explained the situation, and she just said, ‘It will be OK. You don’t have to do everything all at once, and we’ll meet you where you are,” Smith said.
Around the same time, another Ashland woman named Barb Phillips was beginning her own yoga practice at Rise. Phillips, an avid traveler, sought healing from tearing her meniscus while hiking the borders in Kashmir. She was also on a weight loss journey; overall, she has lost over 150 pounds.
Smith and Phillips have become close over the last couple of years practicing side-by-side, and Phillips shared her own perspective on Smith’s growth since they met.
“When I first met her, she was very, very, timid—shy, unassured. She had just gone through a stroke,” Phillips said. “I’ve watched her depth of breath grow, and her ability to hold poses—and my goodness, her workouts are intense.”
Early on, Smith remembers some classes when she “just wanted to run away.” She began to experience non-epileptic (functional) seizures caused by her stroke, and sometimes they would start during class, causing her to lay on her mat and just wait for them to pass.
But within a few months, Smith was going to classes at Rise two to three times weekly. When they hosted a challenge of going daily for 14 days, she tried it—and she was hooked. Today, Smith goes to yoga and strength training classes seven to eight times a week.
Although originally apprehensive about adding strength training to her activities, Smith shared how much she has grown since she started that, too.
“My brain would say, ‘OK, this is what I’m supposed to do: to lower myself down and push myself up,’ but I couldn’t get the signal from my brain to my body to make it happen,” said Smith. “(The instructor) would watch me struggle and struggle and struggle.”
“A couple of weeks in, I came back one day and said, ‘Just so you know, the other day when I left here, I was completely and utterly defeated. But I’m back, because I think we can make it work.’”
By the end of this year, Smith hopes to achieve 10 push-ups and five chin-ups in a row. She says it may take all year to get there, and even if she only gets a fraction of her goal, it will be a success because that’s more than she could do a year ago.
While her physical abilities have drastically improved, Smith has also formed relationships with others at the studio as she meets more people in Ashland with common interests. She has built a new social life with kind-hearted people to talk, laugh and share life’s experiences with.
When Smith participated in the studio’s SOAR Program last fall, counseling was included in their offerings, and she began to process some of her traumas.
“Even though in the end, my dad and I made things right, my mother and I never did,” Smith said. “As a result, one of the big things that came out of this for me was healing, physically and emotionally and spiritually. I was able to open myself to Mary the mother of Christ as my mother.”
“I’m learning to let her mother me, and I get a little emotional, because that’s hard for me. Because nothing in my memory of my mother was ever good, nobody would ever think that was good. That was miserable.”
“And it helped me realize a few things that I guess I subconsciously knew in the process between stroke and this time, but I hadn’t fully, consciously acknowledged: that I was enough. I don’t know why this just popped into my head, but one of the things I was told is, ‘You’re so funny, and I love your sense of humor.’ I’m 60 years old, and no one’s ever told me that my entire life.”
What started as a devastating, life-altering event for Smith has led her on a journey of unprecedented healing and growth. Today, she embraces a healthy social life, her physical strength has been regained and continues to grow, and she practices vulnerability in her conversations and through personal journaling.
When asked about the changes she has seen in Smith since they met in 2018, Phillips paused for a moment before replying.
“Oh, my goodness. Confidence. Joy. She went through this harrowing experience, but it didn’t get her. It doesn’t define her. Brightness. Her whole energy has changed. The way she talks about her experience with this stroke has changed from victim to conqueror,” said Phillips.
“I boldly use the word miraculous. I boldly use the word transforming. Kind of like the water lilies. They come up out of the muck in the dark—and look how beautiful they are.”
