01/09/2026
There is a period around your illness that you cannot remember clearly. You have described it as losing consciousness after the wedding at Farm Street and “waking up” about ten days later in St Thomas’s. That is what those days feel like from inside your memory.
I was unconscious for those ten days.
Friends, family, messages and medical records now allow us to reconstruct a remarkable amount of what actually happened. During the period you cannot remember, you travelled around London and beyond, met friends for meals, celebrated Mass, held serious conversations, took notes, used your phone, negotiated public transport and repeatedly found your way home. At the same time, people who knew you well were seeing increasingly worrying changes in your balance, memory, speech, judgement and ability to do things that had previously been effortless.
The mystery is therefore not that you lost consciousness for ten days. It is that you remained so extraordinarily functional while something was clearly going wrong in your brain - and subsequently retained almost no memory of doing it.
This account tries to give those missing days back to you. It also follows what happened afterwards, because the story is not simply about becoming ill. It is about what happened to you, how much you recovered, and what that recovery may teach us about preserving the independence that matters so much to you.
A note about certainty matters here. We now know that hospital investigations identified bilateral posterior middle cerebral artery ischaemic strokes and a small right subdural haematoma, described in the records as acute on chronic. What the records available to us do not establish precisely is when each stroke occurred, when the bleeding began, or which neurological event caused each of the symptoms people observed.
So, where we know something, this account says so. Where somebody remembers something, it identifies it as their recollection. And where we do not know, it does not invent an answer.
Before hospital: the missing days
Sunday 19 April appears to be the earliest warning sign we currently have. Catherine attended your Mass at the Assumption Convent in Kensington Square. She remembers you being unusually sensitive and frustrated when the sound system was not working properly. More strikingly, your sermon was not your usual concise, logical prose; it rambled and drifted off point. Afterwards you seemed distant and reluctant to engage. Nobody thought this was a medical emergency. Catherine wondered whether you were simply beginning to show your age.
That observation becomes more interesting because the hospital record later recorded you reporting that your loss of balance had begun roughly three weeks before your admission. Neither fact tells us that you had already suffered a stroke by 19 April. They do tell us that unusual behaviour and balance problems may have begun appreciably earlier than your eventual admission.
We still have a genuine gap between 20 and 23 April.
Saturday 25 April is much clearer. You celebrated Henry Lakin and Kinvara Mactaggart’s wedding at Farm Street Church. Mary Padfield remembers you greeting people normally at the door. Around the beginning of the wedding Mass, however, you became distracted and confused. You shuffled your papers, seemed uncertain where you should be and had difficulty navigating a ceremony that should have been deeply familiar. Henry quietly helped guide you through it.
Mary recognised that something was wrong. She took you into the church garden, sat you down and urged you to see a doctor or go to hospital. You insisted that you were all right, explaining that you were tired and stressed and had not conducted a wedding for two years. At the reception Mary tried to keep an eye on you, but you eventually left the party without Mary realising you had gone. She, Christina and others repeatedly tried to contact you afterwards.
Your own last clear memory is different. You remember being handed a glass of white wine, before drinking it, and everything going grey. In your memory, that is where the lights go out. That is where I lost consciousness
But your life continued.
On Sunday 26 April Mary emailed you because she and Christina remained worried. Her message is useful contemporary evidence because it was written before anybody knew what the eventual diagnosis would be. She described you as having looked like “a rabbit in the headlights” during the wedding and said she had wondered at the time whether you had experienced a TIA. She urged you to see a doctor.
On Monday 27 April, your reconstruction records that you had lunch with Mary Richardson at the Army & Navy Club. Mary apparently noticed nothing unusual about your behaviour or conversation. Around this time, you also replied to Mary Padfield saying that, after lunch at the Army & Navy Club, you had walked back without needing your walking stick and that your “balance has recovered”. That last phrase is particularly significant: whatever you understood to have happened, you were already aware that you had recently been having problems with your balance.
Tuesday 28 April is one of the best reconstructed days. You spoke to Marcelo at around 9.00-9.15 that morning and arranged to meet him outside WH Smith at Victoria at about 11.30. Marcelo arrived. You didn't. After waiting about twenty minutes he telephoned you, and you appeared to have no recollection of the arrangement you had made only a few hours earlier.
You eventually met. Marcelo noticed that you were walking somewhat randomly and that your gait was wobbly. He took your arm. Yet during lunch your conversation seemed normal and you ate and drank normally. When you stood up, your balance was again poor enough for Marcelo to walk you all the way back to the entrance of your flat. He telephoned you that evening and once again you seemed normal.
Wednesday 29 April is perhaps the clearest illustration of what was happening. You told Marcelo that you were celebrating Mass at Our Lady of the Rosary in Staines and coherently gave him the church name and address. You met near the station and walked there together. Initially everything seemed normal.
During Mass, things changed. Marcelo noticed that it took you unusually long to find your place in the Missal. Your homily contained unusually long pauses. You went back to the Missal to read the Gospel, which was not your normal way of preaching.
Afterwards, however, you spoke with people in the vestry and then went walking and shopping with Marcelo. At one stage you strode ahead as though certain where you were going but did not respond when Marcelo called you. When he caught up, your conversation seemed slower.
Then you went to his flat, ate well and listened while he read a theological article. You apparently understood the theology and took notes. At around five o'clock you travelled home independently, including changing trains at Clapham Junction. Marcelo later telephoned and established that you had arrived safely.
What is striking about that day is how unevenly you seemed to be affected. At some moments, familiar things were unexpectedly difficult: finding your place in the Missal, delivering your sermon in your usual way, or navigating through Staines. Yet not long afterwards you could follow a theological discussion, take notes and make your way home independently by train, including changing at Clapham Junction. This helps explain why neither you nor those around you immediately recognised quite how seriously unwell you were: many of your abilities remained intact, while others were fluctuating.
We currently know little with confidence about Thursday 30 April.
On Friday 1 May, Anna McMahon telephoned you with Patrick listening on speaker. They were horrified by what they heard. Your speech was incoherent and contained long silent gaps. Anna initially wondered whether you were already in hospital.
You weren't. You told her that you were on a bus travelling home after having celebrated Mass and expected to arrive home in about thirty minutes.
Anna repeatedly tried to telephone afterwards. When she received no answer, she sent a WhatsApp message because she could at least see whether you could open it. It was opened at 19:50.
Again, some abilities remained remarkably intact despite the difficulties others were noticing: Anna and Patrick were seriously concerned by your speech, yet you had apparently celebrated Mass, travelled home by bus and could still use WhatsApp.
By Saturday 2 May Anna was sufficiently worried that she and her family were trying to find contact details for your relatives. They knew you had family but did not know how to reach them. She continued telephoning you without success.
On Sunday 3 May the scattered concern around you finally turned into action. Anna and Patrick tried to get somebody to check on you. Anna contacted Westminster Cathedral, Fr Gerard Sheehan, the police and NHS 111. Fr Gerard contacted the Vicar General. An ambulance was eventually sent and you were taken to St Thomas’s.
Marcelo remembers speaking to you while you were in the ambulance. You told him you were fine and had “just fallen down.”
You arrived at St Thomas’s because of altered mental state and balance problems.
At 17:00 your phone sent Rob the message: “I in Thomas, hospital treatment on lost balance”. You later believed that, after a scan, you had been told you could go home. Rob subsequently spoke to the orderly who had taken you for the CT scan. He said that you had asked to go to the toilet; he pointed you towards it, and you then disappeared. He spent an hour or more looking for you around the department. We know that you then set off for home under your own steam. St Thomas’s later told Anna that CCTV showed you leaving A&E at 17:50. You attempted to walk across Westminster Bridge despite being unstable. A couple stopped to help you, and Rob spoke to them by phone to help them get you safely back to your flat.
Meanwhile, people were trying to find you. St Thomas’s contacted Anna, and the police became involved and carried out a welfare check. By the time they arrived at your flat, Rob and Alex had also got there and found you disoriented and confused. With no obvious way of reaching anyone at the Cathedral on a Sunday evening before a Bank Holiday Monday, they had been considering taking you back with them so that you would not be alone. When the police arrived, they took you back to St Thomas’s A&E. Rob and Alex went with you and stayed until about 2.00am on Monday morning, by which time you had been admitted to a ward.
On the 6th May, ‘I woke up’. Regaining my consciousness..
What the hospital discovered
The medical records turn the observations of your friends into something more concrete.
Hospital investigations identified bilateral posterior middle cerebral artery ischaemic strokes together with an approximately 5 mm right subdural haematoma. The bleed was described as acute on chronic. Later imaging showed that the subdural haematoma had resolved without surgery.
What we should not do is reverse-engineer a neat medical sequence from the witness accounts. Mary understandably thought you had suffered a TIA at the wedding. Your own theory is that one or perhaps both strokes happened earlier and that another event caused the final collapse. Those are plausible attempts to make sense of what happened, but the records we currently possess do not establish that chronology.
What they do establish is that something neurological had happened and that the consequences were substantial.
During the acute period you had significant cognitive difficulties. The later consultant's history records confusion, word-finding problems and an inability to use your mobile phone. The hospital's rehabilitation referral describes slow processing, poor recall and impaired executive functioning. You could perform basic personal care independently, but more complicated activities such as meal preparation required prompting or supervision. Even unlocking your phone with its passcode could require assistance.
Speech and language assessment identified higher-level problems with inference, written comprehension, attention and verbal reasoning. Physiotherapy found a mild coordination deficit in your left leg. Most importantly, the hospital team judged that your executive-function difficulties made you unsafe to return home independently at that stage.
This distinction is important.
You had not become physically helpless. You could walk and look after yourself. The stroke had affected some of the higher-level abilities that allow an exceptionally independent person to organise life safely: remembering, planning, judging, adapting, processing information and recognising when something is going wrong.
That also explains something that was difficult for you and for people around you. You could feel perfectly capable because many of your abilities genuinely were intact while simultaneously being impaired in areas that mattered greatly to your safety.
I was transferred to St Teresa’s Home, Wimbledon on 1.6.26
I moved back to my Flat 4, 8 Morpeth Terrace, SW1P 1EQ on 7.7.26
The beginning of the recovery
The hospital rehabilitation goals give us a useful snapshot of how much had temporarily changed.
The team wanted you to regain independent meal preparation, use your mobile phone independently to call friends or summon help, plan and complete shopping, return to independent outdoor walking, use public transport and eventually write and deliver a homily again.
Those goals sound almost mundane until we remember who you were before the stroke. These were not new skills. They were things you had been doing effortlessly.
Recovery therefore meant reclaiming your own ordinary life.
And you began doing so surprisingly quickly.
Your physical recovery was particularly strong. By the consultant assessment on 11 June you could walk independently without an aid, manage stairs and had full strength in both arms and legs. You could follow complex multi-step commands. Your word-finding difficulties had resolved and you could once again use your phone and communicate effectively.
There were still significant concerns. A post-stroke MoCA cognitive assessment had been 21/30. Short-term memory difficulties remained, together with executive-function problems and post-stroke fatigue. Your gait showed shortened stride, reduced arm swing and a tendency to look down while walking.
Only weeks earlier, you had needed prompting to unlock your own phone. The trajectory of your recovery was already clear.
St Teresa's: getting ready to go home
You left St Thomas’s on 1 June and went to St Teresa's for a period of convalescence rather than immediately returning to your flat due to the constraints of having support inside the Cathedral complex.
That was understandably frustrating. You wanted your own life back. From your perspective, being physically capable and being prevented from simply going home could feel like incarceration.
But the issue was no longer whether you could walk up the stairs to your flat. The question was whether you could safely run your life once you got there.
That required testing rather than assumption.
Occupational therapy subsequently found some residual higher-level difficulties: mild short-term memory problems, reduced attention to the left, occasional safety problems when crossing roads, reduced flexibility in unfamiliar situations and initially limited awareness of some of those difficulties.
At the same time, the assessments began demonstrating just how much of the old Vlad was intact.
In one assessment you travelled independently by public transport to church and successfully led about thirty minutes of Mass. You found everything you needed, prepared for the service, knew the structure and sequence and delivered a sermon appropriately. The therapist specifically described your procedural memory for the Mass as excellent.
There were still occasional difficulties. Leaving a Tube station, you initially went in the wrong direction. But you recognised the problem, sought directions and corrected yourself.
In shopping and cooking assessments you located what you needed, led the way home and prepared pasta while simultaneously talking to the therapist. Your sustained attention, sequencing and ability to perform two tasks together were good. On an earlier occasion, in my niece Catherine’s house, you forgot to turn off the gas cooker - as in my flat I have an electric one which turns itself off after use.
The important point is not that you made a mistake. It is what happened over successive assessments.
The therapist took you into a less familiar environment in Wimbledon. By then you had become more conscious of the earlier problem with attending to your left and deliberately compensated for it. You navigated busy pavements and pedestrian crossings safely without prompting.
Then came the home assessment.
You navigated independently to your flat, managed the stairs, identified your flat and unlocked the door. You prepared pasta safely, managing boiling water and cooking times, turning off the hob and recognising hot cookware. You talked to the therapist at the same time and checked the environment before leaving.
Outside, you independently navigated to your usual Italian restaurant and local supermarket. You interacted appropriately with other people and handled everyday financial matters.
Road crossing remained the main concern. On one occasion you crossed away from a designated crossing and initially failed to re-check to the left, missing an approaching cyclist until late. You nevertheless saw the cyclist before a collision occurred and responded appropriately. Fatigue was also noticeable towards the end of the assessment before you yourself recognised it.
The formal risk assessment consequently rated most of the practical risks of independent living as low. Road-crossing judgement and functioning in unfamiliar environments were the principal medium-level risks. Overall, the OT judged the risks of returning home with appropriate support to be low to medium and manageable.
By 2 July, after five occupational therapy sessions, the professional conclusion was strikingly different from the hospital assessment of 20 May. You now demonstrated good functional cognition, mobility and independence in familiar home and community environments. The OT considered you safe to return to your own flat and resume your usual routines, with appropriate monitoring and welfare checks.
Seven weeks earlier the hospital team considered your cognitive problems sufficiently serious that returning home was unsafe.
Now you had demonstrated that you could do it.
Coming home
You returned to your own flat on 7 July. That date deserves more significance than simply “the day the convalescence ended.” Coming home was not proof that the strokes had been trivial. Coming home was the achievement.
You had regained abilities that had genuinely been impaired. The comparison is unusually concrete. On 20 May you needed prompting to unlock your phone and supervision for complex everyday activities; independent shopping, public transport and delivering a homily were rehabilitation goals.
By early July you were travelling independently, shopping, cooking, managing everyday transactions and celebrating Mass successfully.
That is substantial neurological and functional recovery. And it is still continuing.
Some small pieces remain stubbornly missing. PIN numbers, details of travel arrangements and other information that once came instantly may now sometimes have to be looked up. Short-term memory was one of the residual difficulties documented by both the consultant and occupational therapist.
But the contrast with what remains intact is equally important. The procedural knowledge required to celebrate Mass survived exceptionally well. So did much of your language, reasoning, social ability and capacity to navigate the world.
Your brain did not simply switch from “working” to “not working.” Different abilities were affected differently, and different abilities have recovered at different rates.
What this experience can teach us
What stands out from this story is how much of you remained intact even while you were seriously unwell. Your independence, intelligence, experience and determination allowed you to keep functioning to a remarkable degree, and those same qualities have undoubtedly helped you recover.
There is, though, another lesson within the story. For a time, those strengths made it harder for you to recognise when something was wrong and when it might be wise to trust the judgement of people who knew you well.
There were moments when people who knew you well could see difficulties that you could not necessarily recognise yourself.
Mary and Christina urged you to seek medical attention after the wedding. You resisted. Marcelo saw balance and memory problems. Anna and Patrick heard the deterioration in your speech. On 3 May, even while being taken to hospital, you told Marcelo you were fine. Then, after reaching St Thomas’s, you left because you believed you could get yourself home.
At those moments, your understandable confidence in your own abilities did not always give you an accurate picture of the risks you were facing. That does not mean you cannot trust yourself now. It means something much narrower and more useful. There may be rare moments when protecting your independence requires borrowing somebody else's judgement.
That is not surrender. It is insurance.
Using your determination wisely
Your determination – and very high physical fitness due to me 85 squats and press-ups on alternate days has probably been an important part of your recovery. You compete with yourself. You dislike being thought frail. You want to do things because you can do them, not because somebody has decided that somebody your age ought to be allowed to. Keep that.
But determination is a tool, and tools can be pointed in the wrong direction.
Competing with yourself to remember a PIN without looking it up may simply produce frustration. Finding the PIN securely in the place where you have recorded it and completing the transaction yourself preserves the thing that matters: your independence.
Likewise, cooperating with an assessment is not admitting incapacity. Sometimes it is the fastest route to demonstrating capacity.
There is a difference between being independent and never accepting assistance. The first is worth protecting. The second can sometimes make independence harder rather than easier.
During your time in hospital, you apparently spoke repeatedly about needing to be “more humble” and to “stop the pride”. Those were your own words. Perhaps the useful interpretation isn't that you should become less confident or less formidable, but simply more selective about where you spend that formidable determination. Use it on the things that enlarge your life.
The people around you
There is another story running alongside the medical one. When things began to go wrong, people noticed because they knew you.
Mary knew how you normally celebrated Mass. Marcelo knew how you normally walked, talked and preached. Anna and Patrick knew immediately that the voice they heard on 1 May was not normal. Catherine had noticed something different as early as 19 April. Rob knew you weren’t the same uncle he regularly spoke to on the Family call each Sunday.
That knowledge mattered clinically too. A professional meeting you for the first time could see an articulate older man who could walk and converse. Your friends and family could add something important: “This isn't how Vlad normally is.” They knew your baseline.
There was also a weakness in the network. The many people who cared about you were not necessarily connected to one another. When friends became frightened, some did not know how to reach your family. They searched online, telephoned churches and the Cathedral, contacted the police and NHS and repeatedly tried your flat and mobile. Eventually the network connected. It should stay connected.
Independence needs infrastructure. Trusted people knowing how to reach one another, somebody knowing where you are when appropriate, having important information accessible and allowing people to intervene when something is clearly wrong are not signs that you have lost independence. They are part of the machinery that keeps independence possible.
What matters now
The evidence does not support treating you as someone who can no longer run his own life.
Quite the opposite. The occupational therapist tested your ability to function independently in the real world and concluded that you could return home.
Nor does the evidence support pretending that nothing happened. You suffered strokes and a brain bleed. For a period you had substantial cognitive impairment. Some higher-level memory, attention and executive difficulties remained during rehabilitation, although they improved markedly.
The sensible position lies between those two extremes.
Keep doing things.
Keep travelling. Keep celebrating Mass. Keep seeing people, thinking, arguing, learning, exercising and organising your own life.
When something has become harder, find a workaround rather than turning it into a test of character. Write things down. Look things up. Use the diary. Put important information somewhere reliably retrievable. Ask for directions. Take a little more time. Accept help when the cost is trivial and the benefit substantial.
And if several people who know you extremely well suddenly tell you that you are not behaving like yourself, take them seriously - even if you feel perfectly well.
Listen.
The bargain with independence
Perhaps this is the bargain.
Nobody gets permanent independence by denying that they are vulnerable. Independence survives because we adapt as circumstances change.
You spent much of your life being the person other people turned to when something difficult happened. During these weeks the direction of care reversed. Friends and family worried, searched, persisted, challenged you, visited you and advocated for you.
That reversal does not cancel everything that came before it.
In a sense, it is the dividend.
You invested in people for decades. When you needed them, those relationships paid out.
So, keep on keeping on trying to help God make this world a better place.. Keep the impatience with unnecessary restrictions. Keep setting the bar high.
But don't waste your independence proving that you never need anybody.
You already proved something much more impressive.
You lost pieces of a life you had previously managed effortlessly. You worked your way back through hospitals, assessments, convalescence, public transport, shops, kitchens, unfamiliar streets and finally your own front door.
Coming home wasn't evidence that nothing much had happened.
Coming home was the evidence of how far you had recovered.
copyright Prof. Msgr. Vladimir Felzmann
