
It’s always the right time for stroke awareness. Right now you can watch the documentary, “My Beautiful Broken Brain” on Netflix. The documentary tells the story of a young woman and filmmaker, Lotje Sodderland, who experiences a stroke aged 34. We meet Lotje in the first days after stroke, and follow her through that first year.
“It was a year ago.
I’d spent the evening watching fireworks with friends, came home and went to bed. An excruciating pain in my head woke me up.
I felt like I might be dying. I stumbled into a nearby hotel. But I couldn’t speak.”
Around 18 minutes into the film, she describes the impact of stroke on her vision:
“Something’s happened to my, my vision, which nobody’s really explained to me yet. Pretty normal on the left, if I go on the right side, it’s like a whole other dimension… I can experience color and sounds like I wasn’t able to before.” Nobody really explains it throughout the rest of the film either.
An NHS neurologist explains Lotje’s type of injury, “the commonest type of stroke is actually an area of the brain that is starved of oxygen and loses its blood supply.”
According to research by Pediatric VIEW in Pittsburgh, stroke, or hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) is a leading cause of CVI, cortical/cerebral visual impairment.
Find “My Beautiful Broken Brain,” by Lotje Sodderland, streaming on Netflix.