Jennie Gow had to summon every last bit of strength as she tried to scribble a sentence on to the whiteboard her husband Jamie had brought into hospital to help her communicate.
‘All I wanted to ask was ‘how are you?’,’ she recalls. ‘But it was painfully hard. It took a good 45 minutes.’
Yet only a few weeks earlier, she had been trackside in Abu Dhabi as Formula 1 driver Max Verstappen claimed the 2022 championship title and another glamorous Formula 1 season came to a close.
But just after Christmas, Jennie, then 45, had a stroke that partially paralysed her right side and – terrifyingly for a broadcast journalist – left her unable to speak.
‘In those first few days part of me thought I’d never be able to talk again,’ she says. ‘It was one of the loneliest, hardest things I’ve been through.’
The presenter, now 47, who hosts Radio 5 Live’s F1 coverage and reports on the sport across the BBC, did find her voice again. But not without a struggle – throughout which, she says, the world of F1 stepped up with remarkable kindness to support her.
Today, Jennie doesn’t remotely look like someone who has had a serious stroke – only the way she folds her right arm protectively over her chest, and an occasional hesitancy as she searches for a word, are clues to the catastrophe that befell her. Â
‘I’m lucky I made a good recovery, but there are things I still struggle with – although I’ve got good at masking, so people don’t really notice,’ she says.Â
Just after Christmas in 2022, Jennie Gow, then 45, had a stroke that partially paralysed her right side and – terrifyingly for a broadcast journalist – left her unable to speak
Jennie, husband Jamie and daughter Isabelle. Today, Jennie doesn’t remotely look like someone who has had a serious stroke
‘It’s frustrating because obviously I just want to be able to do everything I did before at the same pace, but I’ve had to accept I can’t, that I will never be quite 100 per cent again – and that there is a part of my brain which is now dead and it can’t come back.’
It is one reason why Jennie is speaking publicly about her ordeal, hoping to remind people how to diagnose stroke symptoms – the quicker a stroke is treated, the better the outcome.
‘People often think of strokes as something that happens to older people or those with pre-existing medical problems – but they don’t,’ she says. ‘When you delve into it you realise there are any number of fit, healthy people who are affected.’
This month, the NHS warned of a startling rise in strokes among younger Britons, with a 55 per cent increase in the number of people in their 50s suffering them.
This ‘is largely lifestyle driven’, says Professor Deb Lowe, a stroke doctor at Wirral University Teaching Hospital, Merseyside.
‘We have got an increasingly unhealthy younger population and nine out of ten strokes are due to modifiable risk factors such as smoking, a sedentary lifestyle, poor diet and poorly controlled high blood pressure.’
These damage blood vessel walls and raise the risk of clots, blocking blood flow to the brain.
Jennie’s stroke, however, was caused by a clot that came from the carotid artery in the neck and a tear in the blood vessel – caused by coughing. These tears (called carotid artery dissections) ‘account for about 2.5 per cent of strokes overall and 20 per cent of strokes in the under-40s’, says Professor Lowe, who is also medical director of the Stroke Association.
Seven months after her stroke, Jennie did her first on-air interview with former champion Lewis Hamilton as the world of F1 stepped up with remarkable kindness to support her
But, while alarming, Jennie’s has turned out to be a positive story, too.
She has returned to work part-time, and just seven months after her stroke did her first on-air interview with former world champion Lewis Hamilton.
‘His team, Mercedes, were amazing,’ she says. ‘They normally give you ten minutes to chat, but they gave me 25 minutes – and ten minutes of that was off camera, talking to Lewis; him giving me advice on easing myself back in. My speech was still quite staggered with long pauses, but it felt so good to be back.’
Jennie used her convalescence to write a guide to the sport.
‘It gave me a reason to get up in the morning,’ she says.
‘I do feel lucky. I still pinch myself. Formula 1 is such an extraordinary place to work.’
It is also through motorsport that Jennie met her husband, Jamie Coley, 43, when he became her producer. They married in February 2012, and in 2016 their daughter Isabelle was born.
Life since has been the busy marathon faced by most working mums – until the morning of December 29, 2022, following a festive period marred for Jennie by a bad bout of flu.
‘I had such a terrible cough that I tested myself for Covid twice, but it was negative,’ she says.
That morning, she walked into the bathroom and the next thing she remembers is trying to grab on to the sink.
‘That’s when it must have happened,’ she says. ‘It’s like a shutter coming up and down, so I only remember certain bits.’
Jamie, hearing an enormous crash, rushed in to the terrifying sight of his wife collapsed.
Jennie says she ‘had to summon every last bit of strength’ as she tried to scribble a sentence on to the whiteboard her husband Jamie had brought into hospital to help her communicate
Jennie, now 47, hosts Radio 5 Live’s F1 coverage and reports on the sport across the BBC, has found her voice again
‘He called an ambulance, and Isabelle, bless her, went to get some cushions from the lounge to put under my head,’ says Jennie, her eyes filling with tears. Jamie and Isabelle, who was six at the time, accompanied Jennie as she was blue-lighted to hospital.
She says: ‘My brain just wasn’t functioning. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t communicate. It was so frightening.’ Jamie was told that his wife might not make it.
A carotid artery dissection, as Jennie suffered, can occur for a variety of reasons – from traffic accidents to sporting injuries – ‘but also very rarely, as a result of extremely violent coughing’, adds Professor Lowe.
Its impact was writ graphically on her brain scan, ‘which showed a greyed out area where the cells had died’, says Jennie.
Doctors gave her a clot-busting drug before she was transported to St George’s Hospital in South London for surgery to remove the clot. Thankfully, it went well.
‘I woke up in the operating theatre with Jamie by my side and I couldn’t understand what was happening,’ she says.
She was put in a side room where she had to confront the reality of her physical limitations. ‘It’s like someone pulled out a plug, and you have to start everything again,’ she says.
‘I couldn’t really move my right side, and I couldn’t communicate at all. It was pretty terrifying. I think both Jamie and I thought straight away that we were in trouble.’
As fireworks rang in the new year 2023, Jennie watched the clock tick wondering if she would make a full recovery.
‘I think that was the most scared I have ever been,’ she says. ‘I know doctors were concerned that I hadn’t started speaking in some form following surgery, which wasn’t a good sign.’
She believes it was down to one of her nurses that she finally found her voice. ‘She told me I had to get angry, to find that energy,’ recalls Jennie.
‘She kept asking me to try to say an O or an A. I couldn’t do it. Then one morning at breakfast time, the nurse was with me saying ‘you’ve got this’.
‘And I did it, I said ‘O’. And by the end of the next day, I was able to say ‘thank you’ to her. It wasn’t hugely understandable, but I knew I was on my way.’
Jennie has since undergone hours of physical and speech therapy to regain full movement in her arm and get her broadcast voice back. ‘I was utterly determined,’ she says.
She did her first live reporting in August 2023 at the Dutch Grand Prix.
‘I was incredibly nervous about going into the pit lane for the first time,’ she says.
‘I doubted whether I’d be able to process it with all the sounds and everything going on, and still be able to broadcast – but I just felt like I was at home.
‘I couldn’t speak at the speed I wanted, but I could at least deliver something.’
Today, Jennie tires easily, but considers herself one of the fortunate ones – ‘that Jamie heard me fall, that we live close to the hospital, and I had such amazing nurses and doctors. I have a lot to be thankful for’.
How to Read F1: Everything You Need To Know About Racing In The Fast Lane by Jennie Gow (£16.99, Penguin).
