‘Having a stroke at 26 was massive learning curve’

Reflecting on her experience of recovery, she said it was not about returning to normal or “looking better”.

“Fatigue was the biggest effect for me,” she said. “You can sleep for eight and a half hours and wake up still tired. The brain needs time to recover.”

Beyond the physical recovery, Foster said as a young stroke patient, it was hardest “watching everyone carry on with their lives while you are recovering”.

“Your 20s are meant to be the time you’re living. It feels like it was just stopped for a while,” she said.

Foster described herself as a sociable person who now found situations “overwhelming” that she would not have done in the past.

But it was about adapting, she said.

“Being young doesn’t mean recovery is easy and you bounce back,” she said.

“Recovery isn’t linear, it’s really tedious.”

Foster said she continued to receive support to improve her memory and her arm and hand movements, and explained that therapeutic work helped to “re-teach the brain” what it used to know.

“Stroke can happen at any age,” she said. “Finding out why it happened is just as important to understand as recovering.”

Charity Different Strokes, which supports young stroke survivors, says more than 100,000 people in the UK have a stroke or mini-stroke every year.

It says most people who have strokes are over 65, but one in four strokes happen in younger people, external, which equates to almost 40,000 people a year including several hundred children.

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