‘Trapped in my own body, I fought back to run again’

USED to juggling three young children, a marketing career and a passion for long-distance running, when Kate Allatt developed a severe headache she brushed it off as a minor inconvenience to her hectic lifestyle.

However, when she suddenly collapsed at the family home in Dore, Sheffield, things were to become far more serious.

At the age of just 39, Mrs Allatt had suffered a stroke, and awoke in hospital surrounded by tubes to discover that she could see and feel everything – but couldn’t move a muscle.

Now, after making a recovery doctors thought impossible, the brave mother-of-three has not only won the accolade of Extraordinary Woman of the Year but has also launched a charity to raise awareness of the little-known Locked-In syndrome.

Mrs Allatt, mother to 12-year-old India, 10-year-old Harvey and seven-year-old Woody, said: “My life was really hectic, to be honest. I now look back and think I had far too much stress.

“My husband Mark was abroad all the time on business and I had three young kids who went all over, doing swimming, Brownies, football – it was full-on.

“I then had my own marketing business and I was busy doing that, I was running, I was planning a trip up Kilimanjaro for my 40th birthday and I was far too busy.

“To be a success, I’d work every hour God sends, working until 10.30pm each night and then I’d be up at 7am.”

In January last year Mrs Allatt began suffering from a headache, which went on for three weeks before she eventually visited a doctor.

The 40-year-old said: “The headache irritated me, but I was too busy to sort it. My husband eventually became so sick of my moaning that he took me to a walk-in centre.

“By that point I was slurring my words. I was transferred from the walk-in centre to A&E, where a junior doctor prescribed me with co-codamol as they thought I was suffering from a stress-induced migraine. They never did all the necessary tests – he just said go home, take co-codamol and rest.

“Four hours later I had the stroke. You could argue that, if that junior doctor had done his job properly, they could have averted it.”

The stroke on February 7 last year was caused by a blood clot in the brain stem and, unbeknown to Mrs Allatt at the time, she was given only a 50 per cent chance of survival.

After being put in a medically-induced coma for three days, she awoke in Sheffield’s Northern General Hospital to discover she was “locked-in” her own body.

“I couldn’t move anything”, she said. “I tried to call out but no noise came out. I didn’t know what had happened to me. Tears just rolled down my face.

“The first question I was asked was by a friend, to see if I was compos mentis. Up until then, the doctors and nurses presumed I was brain-damaged.

“I never knew my prognosis. My friends and family kept those details from me. I later found out they’d told them that I would never walk, talk or swallow again and would have to go into a nursing home.”

She added: “I had no ability to move a thing, other than blink, but I felt everything.

“I was unable even to turn the page of a book or a magazine and laid there, looking at the clock. Every minute of every day dragged.

“The indignity of having everything done for me, I really hated. There was also the fear of hearing or seeing things I didn’t want to.

“Before a man in the next bed died, I overheard doctors discussing the withdrawal of his care and feeding with his family. I really didn’t want to hear them having a similar conversation with my family.

“The whole experience traumatised me. While the doctors and nurses keep you alive, that’s different to the emotional help that you need.”

Instead of the trip to climb Kilimanjaro which she had planned for her 40th birthday, she spent the day alone on the hospital ward with a solitary balloon.

Mrs Allett also said it “killed her” that she was unable to hug her children when they came to visit and could only communicate through coded blinking.

After nine weeks in intensive care, she was transferred to the Osborn 4 rehabilitation ward at the Northern General Hospital, where she was given treatment including physiotherapy, speech therapy and music therapy.

Slowly, and to the amazement of medical staff, she began to recover. First her thumb moved, within months she could sit up, and in July – five months after the stroke – she spoke her first words.

She said: “My friend Alison came to see me one day in May and my right thumb twitched. She said ‘Kate, did you move?’

“I rolled my eyes. She was trying to keep a lid on her excitement, and I didn’t know at the time that my mum had told her just that week that I would never move again.

“I thought it was an involuntary movement and, when I tried to do it again, I couldn’t. But the next day I moved it three times in one go. That’s when I first believed my movement would come back.”

After months of frustrating rehabilitation sessions and getting around using a motorised wheelchair, Mrs Allatt was able to walk out of the rehabilitation unit in September 2010 to return home.

She said: “I was due to come home on October 2 because we were having a new wet room built, as I couldn’t get in the bath.

“But I insisted on going home, Mark was away on business and I came home to a building site but, nontheless, I was home.

“I could get down the stairs once in the morning and I’d go up once at night. The rest of the time I’d live downstairs.”

Now, Mrs Allatt can walk and talk, and has written a book on her experiences entitled Running Free, which is published today.

Last Sunday she and her husband Mark also renewed their wedding vows at the church in Dore where they were first married, 13 years to the day later.

“I just feel enormously lucky”, she said. “That’s why I’ve set up the ‘Fighting Strokes’ charity for young people suffering from strokes or Locked-In syndrome.

“A stroke at 39 is a lot different to a stroke at 70. You still have your whole life ahead of you.

“There wasn’t a Locked-In syndrome charity in the UK, so I wanted to raise awareness and give practical help, especially to those who aren’t in the same sort of postcode as me and who may not get the help they need.

“I used to be able to speak for an hour a day, then there’d be no voice left. Now I can speak for eight hours.

“It just goes to show how you have to persevere. If anyone ever said to me in my life ‘you can’t do this’, I’d say ‘I can, and I’ll prove it’.”

The next step for the official “extraordinary woman”, who used to run 70 miles a week in the Peak District, is to learn to run again

“While I was still in hospital I vowed I was going to run again, and I did – a year to the day after my stroke, I ran 20 metres”, she said. “My next goal is to run a mile before Christmas, and I’m going to do it.”

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