" Congratulations, ” my neurologist said when I first told him I was returning to work. At first, I thought he was being sarcastic. But he wasn’t . Congratulations were actually in order. Throughout my rehab, I heard story after story about stroke survivors who never regained certain abilities. How few ever return to their previous careers fully functional. Only 3–6% of strokes are like mine: A hemorrhagic stroke in the basal ganglia. Of those, nearly half don’t survive the