Often we tend to think of "patients" and "providers." While sometime we may accuse medical teams of forgetting that their patients are whole human beings and not just a wrist band and chart in a hospital bed, it works the other way, too. We sometimes forget that our doctors are more than white coats adjusting out medications and asking who the president is -- again. But doctors are, in fact, human. And they can create art. And they can have strokes. Dr. Bevan Choate, MD, was a surgeon and urologist just enter the heart (or kidney) of his career. One morning, everything changed. He shares his story of the past 18 month in this episode. (If you don't see the audio player below, visit http://Strokecast.com/Bevan to listen.)   Click here for a machine-generated transcript Who is Dr. Bevan Choate, MD? Bevan was bornin 1985 in San Angelo, TX.  What do you do when you are born in San Angelo, TX? You grow up on a horse. As Bevan says: "I grew up in a cattle ranching family.  Cowboying since I could ride a horse but perhaps due to the Waylon and Willie song, they didn’t want me to grow up to be a cowboy. So, I was given all the odd and less glamorous jobs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RePtDvh4Yq4&ab_channel=kdn3249 I realized about midway through undergrad that I wanted to be a doctor.  I was always a science geek at heart, and figured medicine to be a pure and noble application of science. I excelled in medical school and completed my five-year Urology residency in Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico Hospital.  It was the roughest five years of my entire life.  Being a sleepless subordinate for almost two thousand days is a tough pill to swallow.  Nonetheless, I persevered and began practicing Urology in Albuquerque.  It was my calling.  I love it.  I love my patients and some of them even love me.  I did quite a bit of oncologic surgery and got good at robotic surgery using the Da Vinci robot. " Things changed for Bevan on December 3, 2020. That's when a left vertebral artery dissection threw a clot that lodged in the left part of his cerebellar and proceeded to kill millions of valuable brain cells. The dissection has no "attributable etiology." That's how doctors write a shoulder shrug emoji. No one knows why it happened. Bevan just got lucky. The surgeons who were not Bevan got to work. His procedures included a ventricular shunt, a craniectomy, and a left cerebellar strokectomy (surgical excision of infarcted brain tissue post-stroke with preservation of skull integrity, distinguishing it from decompressive hemicraniectomy). As Bevan says, "Yep, I have about 80-85% of a brain.  Not playing with a full deck" Following this adventure, Bevan contended with: Acute Deficits Double vision Visual impairment Vertigo Left-sided ataxia Loss of left fine motor function Inability to walk or balance Chronic Deficits Loss of left fine motor function Balance issues Right sided stroke neuropathy Left-sided ataxia Since then, he's accomplished some impressive things, not the least of which are living and walking. He's also become a published author and a professional artist. He's also still practicing medicine and seeing patients. The laser may need to wait a little while though. It's been quite the year and a half. Typing around a Stroke People approach their stroke recovery in different ways. Bevan and Michael Schutt both launched their writing projects to learn to type with their affected side again. My approach to typing was the opposite. Instead of forcing my left hand to the keyboard, I wanted to get faster more quickly. I taught myself to type more quickly with one hand. I'm currently at about 34 wpm (average for two-handed typists is about 44 wpm). Has that slowed my recovery? Maybe. Recovery is a delicate balance of accepting a disability and fighti