Recovering from stroke, ex-Stanford professor launches cross-country bike ride

After a stroke in 2010, at age 53, Debra Meyerson has learned to accept that she can no longer work, speak or be physically active in the ways she once was, but that hasn’t stopped her from moving forward.

The former Stanford professor, always an avid cyclist, acknowledges that she’s “Type A” enough to have found a way to embark on a 4,300-mile cycling journey across the United States, despite her disabilities. She and her husband, Steve Zuckerman, have launched Stroke Across America, a 100-day road adventure to bring attention to the difficult challenges of recovering from a stroke.

Meyerson and Zuckerman, who also is her care partner, expect that cycling across the country will be “hard,” but so are “many things that are worthwhile,” they said in a column for the American Stroke Association.

“Rehabilitation is hard,” they said. “Staying positive is hard. Navigating life with disabilities is hard, especially in a world that is, unfortunately, still not built to accommodate people with disabilities.”

Hundreds of thousands of people in the United States understand these difficulties. Each year, some 800,000 people experience a stroke and 140,000 of them die. Those who survive are left with disabilities that range from mild to profound.

Meyerson and Zuckerman’s ocean-to-ocean ride begins Thursday in Astoria, Oregon. It mostly follows a northern route through mountains, the Midwest, around the Great Lakes, through upstate New York and into Boston.

The Portola Valley couple organized the trip as part of Stroke Onward, a nonprofit they founded about three years ago to help people recover emotionally from a stroke and to rebuild a sense of identity. Meyerson described her own difficult recovery from aphasia and other significant disabilities in her 2019 book, “Identity Theft: Rediscovering Ourselves After Stroke.”

For their journey, the couple will use an adaptive bicycle that lets them ride in tandem, with a front seat that allows Meyerson to pedal more comfortably from a recumbent position.

Covering an average of 50 to 60 miles per day, they will be joined by other survivors of stroke and traumatic brain injury for all or parts of their journey. Their 15-month-old Goldendoodle, Rusti, also will ride along for parts of the trip, and they will spend their nights sleeping in an accompanying RV.

At 15 towns and cities along the route, the couple will participate in community events with local groups.

“It will be 50 percent celebration, 50 percent info fair,” Zuckerman said.

They invite everyone to monitor their trip online, or to join the ride in person or virtually, through a special feature on their nonprofit’s website. More information is at strokeonward.org.

In certain ways, the bike ride is a culmination of Meyerson’s efforts to recapture the most meaningful aspects of her once active and accomplished life as an academic and mother of three.

“It is emblematic of the journey in recovery,” Zuckerman explained in an interview. “We talked in the book a lot about deeper meaning and purpose. What do you really value? It’s not the title. It’s not the job, but what about it do you value? For us, Deb loved to cycle. I loved to cycle, we loved to cycle together. We couldn’t do it the same way, so how do you adapt? How do you adjust so that you can still do some of the things that you enjoy and that bring you meaning?”

After Meyerson’s 2010 stroke, while on a Tahoe family vacation, she feared she would lose the ability to do anything that gave her a sense of meaning and identity. The right side of her body was left immobilized, and she couldn’t speak.

Meyerson, who also loved to run, ski and sail, had to learn to walk again and regain the use of her right hand. Her continuing aphasia means she still has difficulty speaking. Her  speech difficulties eventually forced her to give up her professorship in Stanford’s schools of education and business, a teaching and writing role that had long shaped her identity.

“The stroke took away my capacity to work as I did before, many of my abilities and many of the other pieces of the life I had built over five decades,” Meyerson said in her book, which was written with the help of her family.

Rebuilding identity is a major challenge for a lot of stroke survivors, Meyerson said, but she and Zukerman say it’s not an issue commonly addressed among doctors and therapists, who mostly focus on patients’ physical recovery.

That’s why she wrote her book. That’s also why she and her husband launched their nonprofit and organized the bike ride.

“The more awareness we create, the more attention these issues will get,” the couple wrote.  “And that will help us to lessen the frequency of stroke, improve interventions that minimize disabilities, and change the stroke system of care to be more supportive of survivors and families in the decades ahead.”