For various reasons, Paul Park, who worked with the U.K. Ministry of Defense, should be dead. That, or at least, fighting for his life in the ICU. That’s because the 49-year old man previously tore a tear in his artery after a really violent cough, which apparently lead to a severe stroke. Yet two years after the ordeal, Park is still pushing and has slowly recovered a number of his motor skills, as well as rebuilt his vocabulary via regular speech therapy. “I had a nasty cold and a violent cough in the week leading up to my stroke, which may have caused the damage to the artery in my neck. I remember my eyes just feeling like tiny little things that kept going and coming back,” Park said in an interview. Prior to the incident, Park was pushed to resign from his position at the Ministry, where he had been working for three decades, due to the stroke and cold. A life-changing violent fit According to Park, he didn’t have any underlying conditions before the incident, and it merely started as a cold. The stroke however, was unforgiving, leaving him partially paralyzed. Determined and not willing to give up at all, Park then spent around six months in a rehabilitation center even though he could only say three words. Fast forward to a couple years, he had slowly recovered and even took up painting. “Every Monday morning I attend a group with other stroke survivors and it’s great . For the first time, I recognize there are other people like me. I love doing my art too, it’s helped so much,” Park said. Per UCI Health, people with either high blood pressure (or some form of brain aneurysm) is at risk from triggering a deadly stroke via blowing your nose, sneezing, or in Park’s case, forceful and violent coughing. That’s because these can suddenly increase the pressure in our brains, therefore causing an unprecedented hemorrhagic stroke. Furthermore, going through either a flu or an allergy spike make these strokes much more common and likely to strike, advised the doctors. Source
