SURVIVING AND THRIVING

After experiencing stroke, Lisa Beaumont refused to let it defeat her - and her formidable attitude has seen her rebuild her life and continue to achieve huge goals along the way, inspiring others to see how it is possible to thrive after such life-changing illness.

‘Recovery is a journey - you must keep going’

NR Times learns more about Lisa and her work as a marketing entrepreneur, leading digital advisor, passionate supporter of fellow survivors, and mother who will never give up on her ongoing neuro-rehab journey Eleven years on from Lisa Beaumont having the two strokes which devastated the life she knew and loved, she continues to experience the journey that is recovery, with highs and lows along the way. Having spent more than year in hospital after her life-changing brain haemorrhage in 2011 - which left her as Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) 3 and having to re-learn to walk after being left paralysed down her left side - Lisa has recently encountered another hurdle in her journey, where she lost her mobility and was confined to her bedroom for weeks on end. But never one to let a setback defeat her, Lisa has continued her rehabilitation with determination, overcoming the searing pain and ulcer caused by problems with her orthotic to regain the ability to walk and enjoy the pleasure of being outside in the summer sunshine. “It has been a huge setback. Not only could I not walk over to my desk in my bedroom, I couldn’t walk downstairs, I couldn’t go outside. I could only see the lovely weather from my window,” says Lisa, now 54. “I’ve had 11 years where I have been fixated by wanting to walk. It has been ridiculously distressing that I can’t walk and continue with my physio regime, and the daily walk up and down our garden path to improve my walking ability. “But to help me through this, I have been going back to my thought processes from the beginning. I’ve always believed you must always focus on what you can do, and not on what you can’t do. “Although I had a period where I was not able to walk, I could do bed exercises. I did more and more bed exercises to try and keep up with my fitness. I did what I could do, rather than focus on what I couldn’t. “I also remembered that this is a journey and you must get through whatever confronts you along the way. Just when you think everything's going well, you might hit a setback. But you keep going.” And while the journey since January 2011 when Lisa had her stroke has seen many challenges, there have also been many positives - from Lisa establishing her own marketing business to becoming a digital expert with such esteem in the healthcare space she works with two of the bestknown names within it - NHS Innovation and NHS-affiliated neuro-rehab platform NeuroProactive. She also supports other stroke survivors - the majority of whom are of working age - through the creation of Different Strokes West Kent, of which she is chair. “I think I’m a great example of the need for long-term rehabilitation when you have a stroke in working age,” says Lisa. “And 11 years in, I have had the highs and the lows. Working for the NHS is the pinnacle of my recovery to date and I am privileged to now be able to help others.” Lisa was 43, the mother of two primary schoolaged daughters, when her stroke occurred one morning as she woke to go to work. An award-winning marketing professional and

busy working mum, Lisa had experienced hypertension for some time. “I work one morning and had a bit of a mild headache. I though maybe it was the glass of red wine I’d had the night before. I asked my husband if he could do downstairs and get me a Neurofen,” she recalls. “When he came back upstairs, I had passed out on the bed and he realised that more than a Neurofen was going to be needed. He phoned the ambulance, but we didn’t know what was wrong. “I suppose now, with hindsight, I was already aware of my history of hypertension, but I wish now that I had built in some lifestyle changes, like mindfulness and meditation. I was probably putting too much on myself and I should have taken a bit more self care. But that’s easy to say now, on reflection, but in reality I was just living my busy life as we all do. “I have absolutely vivid memories of that whole morning, of my husband giving them directions because our house isn’t that easy to find. I remember being on the bed, thinking ‘Please just tell them where we are because I desperately need them’. “But probably most vivid of all is that both of my daughters had got up and out of bed by this time, they were standing with their dressing gowns on, looking on as I was carried down the stairs on a stretcher by the paramedics. “My two little girls looking through the slats of the bannisters, watching this happen, is one of the memories I’ve had with me the whole time.” Having survived her haemorrhage, with 13 months then spent in hospital, the long road to recovery - and the reality of their new life together as a family - was now just beginning. “When I had my stroke, my children had been seven and nine. When I came back home, they were eight and ten. One of them had was ready to move on to secondary school and all sorts of things have changed in their lives,” says Lisa. “I was coming back hoping that we could pick up where we’d left off. But you can't do that. It was very odd for a time. “When you’re in hospital, you think about coming back, but in many ways, it’s not you who comes back. When I came back home, I was still left-side paralysed and partially sighted and lacking executive function of my brain. I had a lot of ongoing daily disabilities. “I could only leave hospital if I had full-time live-in care support, which was a huge thing for us. So although I came home, I wasn’t really mummy coming home. I was almost this patient who came home into their lives.” The process of adaptation was made easier by a series of people who supported Lisa in her recovery, although the reality of being at home was still very difficult. “My very first carer who came was incredible. I have a few angels on my road to recovery, and she was one of them,” says Lisa, who credits her Catholic faith as being crucial in her journey. “I was so lucky that she was our first carer because she understood me and understood the children and the dynamics of the family, she was incredible. “When I first came home from hospital, I was still being PEG fed, because I had suffered so badly with dysphagia. I hadn't been able to eat or drink for that whole first year. But thankfully, after I was at home for a little while, I finally began to swallow, so I could actually eat and have meals with the family. “With the support of my carer, and that of the community physio, I began my mission to walk. At that stage, I was still having to sleep and live in a downstairs living room, because I couldn't get up the stairs to my bedroom. “They said the only way I was going to get

to my bedroom would be if they installed a lift in the house - but we’ve got a lovely house and I didn't want to ruin its interior by installing a lift. “So I said we're not having a lift, I'm going to walk up the stairs. So that's where the whole mission for walking began. “But at first, I couldn't remember how to walk. It wasn't just that my body couldn't walk, it’s like I couldn't remember how to do it. So when I first started walking, I literally had to say to myself, ‘Left, right’. I could move my right leg, and then I had to say to myself ‘Move the other side’. “And after much work, I did it.” Having continued to progress in her recovery, Lisa, by now aged 50, decided she wanted to challenge herself and took the decision to set up her own business in 2017. “When I turned 50, it was my birthday present to myself,” she says. “I gave myself permission to set up my own business because it was something that I wanted to do. “I thought ‘You've got to do this, let yourself do it, you've only got one life, and you've got to do what you can with it’.” Seizing upon the years of marketing experience she had accumulated - which had seen her come top in the country for her Chartered Institute of Marketing Diploma in professional marketing and receive an award from the Worshipful Company of Marketors - Lisa decided to use her knowledge and insight to support businesses in building their presence. “In my mind, I went back over all the different work I'd done in the past. And one of those things was my most recent job, the one I was in when I had the haemorrhage, which was in a local theatre,” she says. “It was at a time when the Arts Council pulled all the financing for the Olympics. So I found myself the marketing manager of a theatre that had no money, so I had to try and help the theatre be a success with no money. And I did it. “So I went back over how I did it, how did I manage to make it such a success. I realised I relied on pure marketing theory and applied it in practice. So I came up with the term ‘thrifty marketing’ and developed an approach where you can achieve your results even when you’ve got no budget. “One of the main things that I do is I focus on something I call ‘social listening’, where I monitor online social platforms to see what people are asking for and what they need. So I match customers with suppliers. “If I was if I wasn't paralysed, then I wouldn't be sitting around all day scrolling through social media - nobody wants to really be doing that. “But when you live with reduced mobility, you look at what you can do. And if you’ve got a marketing and sales head, which I have, every time you look at anything, you think of the opportunities that exist. That is proving really valuable for those I work with.” And from her new-found digital insight, combined with her experience of stroke and neuro-rehabilitation, Lisa has been given roles in consultancy and patient involvement with NHS England and NeuroProactive to help assess their digital offering to survivors and develop and promote them further. She is also committed to peer support through her Different Strokes group, welcoming survivors at all stages of their recovery to help them negotiate their individual journeys. “The first thing I say to my new participants who arrive in my group is that you're still you - you're just you after a stroke. That's all. You mustn't forget who you are,” says Lisa. “In some ways, it’s like after having a baby, and there is such an enormous change in your life. But over time, you begin to realise, actually, I'm still me, I'm just me after I've had a baby. “And for me, it has been so important to be able to work with the NHS. There have been some very difficult times, times where you worry people don’t see you and see the fact you’re in a wheelchair. “I know what it’s like to feel unemployable, even though you know you’re still capable of a lot. But working with the people I do now, they know I work in the mornings because I have my neuro-fatigue rest in the afternoons, but that works. “Returning to work for young stroke survivors can be very hard, but hopefully I can show people that it can be done.” Always looking for new ways to support fellow survivors, Lisa’s next project is to compile a bank of case studies, titled Survivor Thrivers, bringing together stories which describe positive outcomes after stroke and brain injury - a project she is working on jointly with Rachel Ngala (nee King) at South London Neurosciences ODN. “I want clinicians to have a source that’s based on true, lived-experiences which can be shared with patients and families at the dark times to give some optimism, not false hope,” she says. “This is the latest part of my journey; one in which I could only have achieved my successes - physical, emotional and commercial - with the support of my husband, daughters, parents, sisters and my wider family of friends and relations.”