On the evening on 2 September 1997, Edith Kwan suddenly collapsed towards her right hand side as she finished dinner with her former colleagues. When she awoke, she had lost all the sensation on her right hand side. "I realized that I had suffered a stroke. I was not very conscious and did not remember how to cry. My family was very sad, but I just believed that my brain cells were not fully awake."
Edith had suffered a disabling stroke caused by the rupture of blood vessels in the brain. The normal survival rate is 50 percent, while the probability of recurrence in the first five years of the rehabilitative stage is 70 percent. However, eight years have now passed since the incident, so Edith is able to quip, "I am really one of the few survivors."
Edith was 49 years old at the time of her stroke. The mother of a son and a daughter in a stable family, she was also among the top management of the Hong Kong Jockey Club. "I had been very healthy, and was energetic even after playing table-tennis for four hours." Originally she had planned to retire at 55, but the stroke disrupted her plans.
After one month, Edith was discharged from the hospital and received intensive rehabilitative treatment to improve her condition. She benefited greatly from the work of the Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine (IRM) of the HKSR. Now, for example, she can again do word processing. In the early rehabilitative stage, Edith could only say "thank you", but she still volunteered to answer the telephone in the IRM. Once, she found her physiotherapist expressionlessly staring at the computer, and she understood that a computer test was going on. When Edith touched the keyboard, many memories relating to the computer came back to her. She got the problem fixed after three days, and was requested to assist with the follow-up work for the following three months.
Since then, Edith has started on her journey with the HKSR and become a very committed member.
