By Luke Voogt
Herne Hill’s Matty Groenewald was a healthy 26-year-old who loved to surf and ran “five ks a day” when he suffered a stroke in April.
“I thought I was invincible,” the apprentice sprinkler fitter said as he prepared for a Carlton fun run on Sunday.
“People seem to think stroke is an older person’s injury or disease – it’s not – it can happen to anybody.”
Matty hoped to spread that message and give back “to the Stroke Foundation so they can continue their great work.”
He chose the fun run at the suggestion of a physio, after becoming frustrated at his recovery “plateauing”.
“The first three months of my recovery I improved so much,” he said. “They said this would happen, but I’m a pretty impatient person.”
Matty and girlfriend Erin McLaws had just bought together land at Armstrong Creek when the symptoms first appeared.
“I woke up Saturday morning, and I just felt off,” he said.
Matty spent the weekend feeling crook and “struggling to compute sentences”.
But when he woke up Monday morning (10 April), with intense pain in the right side of his head, he began to suspect the worst.
“It was a really distinct location where the headache was,” he said.
He stumbled into walls and fell when he tried to get out of the shower.
“I hit the deck and my girlfriend came running in,” he said.
Matty called in sick, and Erin researched stroke online. But a lack of symptoms like speech impediment or sloped facial features convinced him to go back to bed.
“I was in denial – I didn’t want to seem like a hypochondriac,” he said.
But when Erin returned from work the left side of Matty’s body “wasn’t working” and he had pins and needles in his arm. She rushed him to hospital.
“She was balling her eyes out,” he said.
“Thank God, she was there because who knows what would have happened if I had gone back to sleep.”
Matty “shut out” his friends and family as nurses took him to the toilet, showered him and cut up his food.
“I was so scared of people seeing me so vulnerable, not just physically, but mentally,” he said.
But that changed when his cousin visited him in hospital.
“The best thing for me was letting people back in and them feeding me their positive energy.”
He went from “not being able to sit up in a chair” to walking and attempting to run this weekend.
“I was seeing improvements every day, it was really cool,” he said.
Matty dedicated the run to stroke sufferers “less fortunate” than him, along with his family, friends and his girlfriend.
“They are the ones that got me back to my feet, and I owe them so much,” he said.
To find out how to support Matty, visit doit4stroke.everydayhero.com/au/chargin-home.
