One evening as I am chopping vegetables, my young friend, Jamie, calls me.

She occasionally texts, but never phones. Most weeks, we chat at Brown-Gardiner’s fountain, where she is a popular server — animated, engaged — the primary reason for my going so often.

Answering, I strain to understand Jamie’s garbled speech. The only words fully discernible are “this is Jamie.” She struggles, stuttering, until falling silent. 

Her friend, Lexi, takes the phone. Lexi’s words are crisply clear: Jamie has suffered a stroke. She goes on to say that she has just been released from the hospital following days of unconsciousness and lifesaving surgery. Lexi pauses.

“Jamie wanted you to know.”

Jamie is in her early 30s. A stroke? My knees wobble.

Jamie is the sort who brings life and vivacity into a room, as she has done at the lunch counter. The sandwiches, salads and dishes are standard lunch-counter fare, but nothing special. Jamie is. Often, she’d spot me approaching and open the door in greeting. 

In a few days’ time, after much texting back and forth, Jamie indicates she would like a visit. I take silly gifts: A bath bomb that resembles a doughnut with pastel sprinkles. A satin sleep mask emblazoned, “Shit Could Be Worse.” 

Just like her old self, Jamie howls with laughter.

She has miraculously survived the catastrophic stroke without losing her motor skills. There is no facial paralysis nor limp. No overt paralysis of any kind. Yet Jamie’s brain scans reveal damage to areas controlling speech. She struggles with aphasia and speech challenges.

Jamie chats normally and suddenly goes silent, freezing, searching for a word. This is something I had previously seen when another friend — a woman five decades older than Jamie — had a stroke. 

More than once, rather than asking, “Where’s my phone?” Jamie instead says, “Where’s my brick?” Or, maybe block. Determined to show no reaction as my intelligent and chatty friend struggles to summon words, I still feel my heart sink for her. 

But Jamie’s wit and intelligence are fully intact. She gamely laughs during a terrifying time. “My brain is def broken,” she texts a few months later.

Attempting jokes about the surgery, the hospital stays, the worry she reads in her friends’ faces, Jamie finds her way through her own terror with humor. 

Showing the blackened bruising at her femoral artery after carotid angioplasty and stenting, she declares, “But I’m still pretty!”

Everyone reassures Jamie she will soon be well. Better than new. Even so, Jamie  cannot drive, or resume college classes nor work for six months minimum. 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah!” she will mutter, not cynically, but with convincing force, intent upon powering back to health. 

One day, I mention that a collection jar for her benefit has been placed at Brown-Gardiner. Jamie texts back, asking if the picture chosen “makes me look pretty.” I report back that, in fact, it does. Her smile — her face — beams from the jar. Faithful patrons contribute small change and bills. 

One day, $1,000 is dropped in the jar by a single group of customers. Jamie reports as best she can that it was from guys she always served on the Saturday morning shift. While she struggles to fully convey who “the guys” are, I try to guess if they are part of a golf team or a tennis league.

Jamie isn’t quite sure, but she is sure of one thing: “They love me.”

As her megawatt smile beams brighter, she adds, “and I love them.”

Since her saga began, Jamie has learned a preexisting congenital defect triggered her stroke, something called arteriovenous malformation, or AVM. In her case, it was located in the carotid artery. Much like aneurysms, it’s difficult for an AVM to be diagnosed until it’s too late.

Strangely, this hasn’t discouraged her. Learning the cause of the stroke has had the opposite effect. With a name, however strange, AVM is an anomaly that she can wrap her mind around, Jamie explains.

The condition is quite rare: Only 1.34 per 100,000 people have AVM.

Somehow, this statistic cracks Jamie up. 

“Of course,” she says, articulating slowly. With a wry smile that says, “it couldn’t possibly be anything commonplace,” she throws her hands up in the air. Since her stroke, in rapid succession, Jamie has been scrutinized and scanned from top to bottom in MRI machines.

“Now I know the deal,” she adds. 

Jamie has learned, to her relief, that she is not a walking time bomb. 

“That was scary. Would I just drop dead?” This was her first thought upon emerging from days of unconsciousness after the stroke.

Jamie’s July birthday week draws together a young group of friends who take her for a celebratory steak dinner. She shares funny moments, reporting that she kept a journal “for my up-and-coming stroke comedy tour.”

Her speech is, against all odds, normal. Yet, the stroke is a bomb that fell onto her old life, segmenting it into before and after.

In the interim, another stent was needed. Weeks of speech therapy and recovery, scans and consultations have become months, now years. Two Christmases have passed. 

Jamie has suffered medical setbacks, forcing her to temporarily abandon online studies begun since the stroke to complete her undergraduate degree. Even so, she will still graduate this year.   

Jamie’s wrestled with red tape in order to get financial assistance. To cope with insurance claims. To get to medical appointments.

Simply to survive.

Yet Jamie’s resolve remains intact. In her first year of the event, she sent a revealing picture of herself at a game table with pieces before her. 

“I’m gonna be sitting here trying to figure this stupid puzzle out . . . making my brain work . . . This is harder than it looks.”

In over two years of struggle, it is the only complaint Jamie has ever texted.