MY LEFT HAND - How memoir helped lawyer make sense of her stroke

Successful commercial lawyer and now author Joy Alliy is a fighter. Last year a stroke left her without the use of the right side of her body and unable to speak or swallow so she used her left hand to write a brutally honest account of her life before and after the stroke and how she came to terms with the condition. Now the memoir, The Metamorphosis of a Butterfly, has been published and Joy is on the road to recovery. Here she reveals to Mark Edwards how the traumatic event led her to re-examine her life.

The warning signs were there. Dizzy spells that would make Joy Alliy feel “like the whole room was spinning” were dismissed by her doctor as vertigo and when she also started experiencing momentary losses of vision – once while swimming with her nephew and once while watching television at home – she told no-one but inwardly noted that it was probably time she booked an appointment with her optician.

They were worrying symptoms, especially in 2020 among the fear and uncertainty of the global Covid pandemic. But 42-year-old Joy was a bright, ambitious commercial lawyer in Dar es Salaam, running her own firm, Novita Law, in a notoriously ruthless and competitive profession. She didn’t have the time to be ill.

Starting over

In September of that year Novita Law – which specialises in corporate and commercial law – marked its fifth anniversary with a small party at its offices in Dar’s city centre. Joy addressed attending colleagues and friends with a moving celebration speech. At its heart was a quote Joy had taken from one of her favourite films, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. “It’s never too late to become who you want to be. I hope you live a life that you’re proud of, and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over.”

She intended the quote to serve as inspiration to her young team – most of them hired straight from university or even high school and set on a steep learning curve – as well as to reference the brave new beginnings in her own career, which had seen her go solo after 12 years working in some of Tanzania’s biggest law firms to a standard that has seen her listed seven times in international legal ranking system Chambers Global Guide.

However, Joy couldn’t have known that soon her life would be hit with a shocking, unavoidable reason to start over once again.

Lawyer - Joy runs her own firm, Novita Law

Just a few days after the party, she woke suddenly at 4am, feeling unwell. She staggered to her bathroom and switched on the light to check her reflection in the mirror, but did not recognise her own face. Convincing herself that she must be dreaming, she returned to bed. When her “life partner” Ross Methven woke by her side a few hours later he found her unable to speak and rushed her to the Aga Khan Hospital. Tests there revealed Joy had suffered an ischaemic stroke caused by a blood clot in the left side of her brain. It had left the lawyer without the use of the right side of her body and unable to speak and swallow.

Life-changing

Joy was overwhelmed by the traumatic changes affecting her body. “I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t process it,” she says.

Who she was had seemingly changed beyond recognition in a moment. “My whole world had come to a complete standstill,” she says. The keen kickboxer could now barely walk. The health fanatic who loved cooking and was meticulous in preparing nutritious meals could now not eat solid food. The eloquent speaker used to verbally sparring with leading figures in industry and government could no longer talk. The woman who was the face as well as the founder of Novita Law, with a dazzling smile photographers loved, could now not even manage a grin, with the affected muscles on her right side causing her facial features to droop.

There was, however, still a part of Joy the stroke could not take away: her will to succeed. She was allowed home from hospital after six days with Ross and Joy’s cousin, Asha Mtindo, sharing caring duties. At first trying to make sense of what had happened to her was painful. Sleep was brokenup with nightmarish visions and sheescaped the mental turmoil withlong hours watching television. Butwithin a few weeks she felt the needto get her thoughts down in writing.With her right side immobilised bythe stroke, she began typing with justher left hand into her smart phone– she couldn’t access her laptop anddesktop as forgetting all of her accesspasswords was among the bizarremind-scrambling effects of the strokethat included the Tanzanian-born Joylosing her much prized posh Britishaccent, the legacy of a UK publicschool education, when her voicebegan to return.

The writing was mentally and physicallytaxing, but Joy stuck at it. In fact,her carers had to limit her to workingon the book no more than an hour aday. “Ross would warn me that it waslike I was back at work again,” Joy says.

Recovery - Joy has had physiotherapy to help her regain mobility

Memoir as therapy

By January she was finished. The result,The Metamorphosis of a Butterfly:A Journey of Rebirth, Hope andTransformation, is now published inpaperback and on Kindle. It’s a fascinatingfirst-person insight into the physicaland mental struggles of suffering astroke as well as a poignant portrait ofthe challenges an ambitious womanstill has to battle today to make hermark in life and the toll it can take.

Writing the book was an importantpart of Joy’s recovery, which has continued apace since. I arranged to talk to her via Zoom in April. She is staying at Scotland-born Ross’s home in Edinburgh – the couple have just arrived from Tanzania after a long wait for covid travel restrictions to ease and Joy intends to recuperate there for the next six months. She sends me a couple of emails ahead of our talk with concerns that I may have trouble understanding her speech and that the conversation may have to be short as she still gets tired easily. However, she appears on my video link looking bright and well and – just nine months after suffering the stroke – proceeds to talk articulately for well over an hour. There is still a slight stiffness to her facial expressions, but she reveals that Ross claims he saw her really smile for the first time since the stroke a few days ago. The reason? Joy had just read my initial request to feature her story in Paa!

With her right side immobilised by the stroke, she began typing with just her left hand into her smart phone

“There was a time when I had no feeling in my upper limbs and just talking for a few seconds would leave me out of breath,” she says. “But now I’m around 70 per cent recovered. I still can’t wiggle my toes, but doctors have told me it will take around a year to fully regain everything.”

Such have been the great strides in her recovery that back in Tanzania, Joy had even started kickboxing again, doing some light punching with her physio. Not that this means she is keen to throw herself back into her old ways. Lessons have been learnt.

She now realises that the relentless intensity of that life was unsustainable. The stroke was proof of that. “I’ve always been a perfectionist and a very independent person,” she says.

The five years with Novita Law inflamed these traits. While Joy had built a young, motivated team, she “struggled to delegate” and found herself “doing 90 per cent of the work”, regularly staying up until midnight to complete tasks.

Learning to relinquish control has not been easy. In the early weeks of her care, she “just had to watch in frustration” as people fussed around her, but she learned to accept the help given her – from the physiotherapy and psychotherapy, which had a positive effect, to the mood enhancing medication prescribed to her at the hospital, which just made her more anxious. Recently the zealously tidy and house-proud Joy has been testing her resolve “by creating mess on purpose”.

The price of perfectionism

In her book, Joy traces the roots of this perfectionism and pursuit of excellence back to her childhood. She and her siblings were bright and “fiercely competitive”. She recounts a time when she ran home from primary school in tears because her long line of top grades had been broken by a‘B’ that day. Her parents ensured theirchildren got the best education tomake the most of their abilities. Joyattended Malvern St James girls’ schoolin the UK, which includes among itsformer pupils a member of Britishroyalty, and continued her studies attwo of the country’s leading universities,Warwick and Durham. I praise herachievements, but she counters wrylythat her brother and sister won placesat Stanford and Cornell, respectively,two Ivy League US universities worldrenowned for their excellence. Good, itseems, was not good enough.

Soon her body was signalling it had had enough. Panic attacks were making work impossible so Joy handed in her notice only to launch Novita Law a month later

Back to boxing - Joy has restarted light sessions with her trainer

Legal career

Joy began her legal career at age 25,winning a place at one of Tanzania’slargest law firms at the time. Sheworked non-stop to impress andwas soon entrusted to managegovernment projects, going on tomake junior partner after sevenyears. However, the long hours andconstant pressure were beginningto weigh her down and just makingit into work each day was becominga struggle. She made the difficultdecision to leave, but rather than taketime to rest she returned to the UK tostudy for a postgraduate diploma atthe Oxford Institute of Legal Studies, aqualification that would enable her topractise law abroad.

When she returned to Tanzania, she joined a smaller law firm, thinking it would allow a better work-life balance. However, her workaholic ways soon resurfaced and her new employers, impressed with her abilities, began assigning her their most demanding cases. In the middle of working on a high-level government transaction that would take two years to complete, she found out her mother had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In just four months the disease claimed her life.

Joy was devastated. In the book she describes feeling “like my heart had been ripped into a thousand pieces” yet she gave no public intimations of her grief, choosing instead to take on even more work projects and push herself even harder in the gym.

Soon her body was signalling it had had enough. Panic attacks were making work impossible so Joy handed in her notice only to launch Novita Law a month later. Now she was in charge, but the responsibility meant she was giving even more of herself to her work – investing her limited savings in the firm, not paying herself for two years yet investing in the legal training of her team and doing the lion’s share of the work.

Looking back, Joy can identify the stresses that are likely to have contributed to her stroke. Her team are running Novita Law in her absence and she is allowing herself the step back. “I have learnt to take it slow,” she says. “Maybe in the future I’ll be a consultant rather than running my own firm.”

Facing prejudice

Other future options to make use of her professional skills include working with charities. She has recently done some advocacy work with stroke survivors, which opened her eyes to not only the large number of sufferers there are in Tanzania, but also the prejudices many of them face. “There are some people here that think you have been hexed or cursed if you’ve had a stroke,” she says. While Joy has been touched by the care and love she has received from friends and family since her illness, not everyone has been as kind and understanding. She recalls being taken out to a restaurant in Dar es Salaam to celebrate her 43rd birthday. The glamorous Joy was used to turning heads on entering a room, but here, frail and unsure on her feet, she was aware of “people staring at me like there was something wrong with me”.

Joy knows prejudice well. As an ambitious woman trying to make the most of herself, she has seen it often. Women are held to higher standards than men in business and Joy knew that she had to be perfect to progress. She knew missteps with drink or drugs would not be forgiven and indecent proposals from senior male staff would be frequent and need to be rebuffed with decorum. As a Malvern St James ‘old girl’, she wrote in its school magazine: “I remember returning to the office once in tears having been sexually harassed by an older government officer. My female colleagues were not very sympathetic and made it seem like this was normal behaviour.” She goes on to say that her drive and ambition were often perceived as threatening by male colleagues. “The IT guy approached me one day, suggesting that I should consider having a child if I am not interested in marriage.”

Even the intensity of her workouts drew mistrust. Many people at her gym could not understand why she wanted to be so strong and take up a violent sport like kickboxing. “You’d think I was starting a revolution, the looks I’d get doing my kickboxing workouts,” she says. What those onlookers didn’t know was that Joy took up kickboxing in 2004 after she was almost choked by an ex-boyfriend. “I wanted to make sure that never happened to me again,” she says.

Second chance - Joy now sees the stroke as a chance to re-evaluate her life

Looking to the future

Joy seems to have found a good man now. She describes her connection with Ross as “not a normal relationship” – their respective jobs mean they spend extended periods continents apart – but they seem made for each other. Ross certainly seems to share her independent streak, having spent a year of his life cycling from Edinburgh to South Africa to raise money for charity.

Joy says her illness has brought them "even closer together”.

His quick thinking in getting Joy to the hospital was crucial and he has been by her side ever since, being her right hand in the early days to help her dress, brush her teeth and eat. He has continued to provide a “calm andnurturing environment”, even leadingJoy in guided meditations when she isfeeling anxious.

This blossoming of love was one of the welcome results of the stroke.Though not all her family had shownthe same “compassion” as Ross,Joy knew that staying positive waskey to her recovery. After all, as shewould tell other stroke victims at theadvocacy sessions: “Most people whenit happens, they think it is the end ofthe world, but actually it is a secondchance to do it right.”

The Metamorphosis of a Butterfly: A Journey of Rebirth, Hope and Transformation, is now published in paperback and on Kindle. It is available online as well as two Dar es Salaam outlets – bookshop A Novel Idea, at the Msasani Slipway and craft store Make It Matter, in Oyster Bay.