Mike Jewell had spent an afternoon in September 2025 pressing apples with friends and drinking a few pints of cider. He started falling over. His friends figured it “must be the booze” and laid him down.
It was a stroke.
Jewell, 42, from Barnstaple in Devon, went home and slept for almost a full day. He woke with what he called a “banging headache.” His wife, Ellie, 38, heard him slurring and making no sense, rang their local stroke unit and took him in. He was blue-lighted on to hospital. Scans confirmed a haemorrhagic stroke, caused by bleeding in or around the brain. Doctors believed it began when he first started falling.
He was monitored for a week. His speech got worse, and a further scan showed the bleed had grown. Surgeons operated on his brain to relieve the pressure, and he spent two weeks in an induced coma while the swelling went down. “My family were terrified,” he said.
His dreams were strange. “I was in hospital fitting windows with (comedian) Romesh Ranganathan and then, as I came out of the coma, I was working in a biscuit factory,” he said.
The real surprise came on waking. Jewell and Ellie’s son Morgan had been born only a few weeks earlier, and Jewell had no memory of him. “When I woke up from the coma, Ellie said, ‘Here’s your son, he’s yours’, and I just said, ‘What?’,” he told PA Real Life. “I had no recollection of him or him being born. It was so weird. He had completely gone from my mind. I absolutely adore him, he’s brilliant, but at first I just didn’t know what was going on.”
Learning it all again
Doctors warned he might never walk again. His left arm and leg were very weak and he could barely string a few words together. “I couldn’t stand up, although I kept trying and I’d end up with my face on the floor,” he said.
They told him he would probably be in hospital until after Christmas and gave him a list of tasks to finish before discharge. Draw noughts and crosses grids. Walk from the ward to the reception desk and back. Make a cup of tea. Unlock his phone and use a touchscreen. “I spent three hours just trying to put my fingers together,” he said.
He finished the whole list within a week, moved to his local hospital in Barnstaple, and was home a few days after that. An occupational therapist and a physiotherapist kept working with him there. Before the therapist signed him off, he had to cook her a meal. He made cottage pie.
Money was tight. Ellie was on maternity leave and Jewell is self-employed. Round Table, the men’s community organisation where he serves as Devon president, raised more than £20,000 through GoFundMe. He went back to work in January on smaller jobs, and by February he was fitting kitchens full-time again.
The couple have two other children, Alanah, four, and Evie, 13, and Morgan is now 10 months old. Jewell still sometimes says the wrong word for the one he means. “It brings it all back,” he said.
The UK’s 275 Round Tables are starting a year of fundraising for Different Strokes, a charity that supports working-age stroke survivors. “I think it’s important people know a stroke can happen to you at any age, and I think my age and fitness helped my recovery,” Jewell said.
