A soccer match changed the life of the now 27-year-old: the ball hits her neck. She keeps playing. There seems to be no injury. Two weeks later, the student suddenly becomes hemiplegic from one second to the next. "At first I thought, I may have pinched a nerve in my hip but somehow everything felt so differently." Still, she is not terribly worried. It takes a few more hours before she finally calls her parents. The symptoms are obvious: she is unable to speak and only able to groan. Her mother, a nurse, has her taken to hospital by ambulance. This is where she gets her diagnosis: she had suffered a stroke. The jolt to her neck loosened a blood clot that later traveled to her brain. The result: she loses her speech for months, has problems with concentration, attention, and memory and suffers paralysis on one side of her body.
From one day to the next, the young competitive athlete became impaired, had to drop out of her "International Management" studies and had to start from scratch. For three to four months she was entirely unable to speak and was only able to communicate non-verbally. At some point, she regained single words and during the following one-and-a-half years of rehabilitation, she learned to speak a little better with each passing day.
She is a fighter and determined to take her life into her own hands. That’s also why she would not let physicians tell her to just wait and see. She ends up embarking on a new study program, even though she is still unable to speak at that point. Her new goal is a bachelor’s degree in rehabilitation psychology. It works and her studies also turn into "self-therapy sessions" at the same time.