LAUSR

It is now ten years since I suffered a stroke. I continue to improve, albeit much more slowly than in the first one or two years. Readers of English Today may remember (Schwyter, 2011) that I was head of the English Department at the University of Lausanne, and a graduate of both the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge. My stroke came really out of the blue; I did not have any of the early warning signs. And the only possible risk factors I was aware of were very long working hours and stress in all its forms – though ‘stress’ is not very well defined medically, being not one symptom but rather a cluster of symptoms (Kivimäki et al., 2015).