Surrey woman who suffered stroke at 18 years old shares story on World Stroke Day
It's part of the Stroke Association's Survival is not Enough Campaign
A woman from Egham who had a stroke when she was 18 is sharing her story ahead of World Stroke Day.
Mia Bruce is raising awareness of stroke as part of the Stroke Association's 'Survival Is Not Enough' campaign.
The national campaign aims to spotlight the fragility of the brain and the life-changing impact a stroke can have on people of all ages.
Mia was working towards becoming a professional dancer, she tells us she practiced 6 days a week for roughly 9 hours before she collapsed during a dance class in January 2019, she tells us what it was like in that moment
"Out of nowhere, one day in rehearsal, I collapsed and lost all feeling on the right side of my body. I couldn't speak, I couldn't walk, I couldn't do anything for myself."
Mia had had a stroke and needed emergency surgery, known as a thrombectomy.
"I was taken to hospital up in London, King's College Hospital, where they discovered two clots on my brain, one on the side of my head and one close to the top of my spinal cord.
I was taken into immediate emergency surgery where luckily they were able to remove one of the clots, but the clot close to my spinal cords, it deemed too risky to remove it in surgery.
So they just left that one. And I woke up from surgery. I had no idea where I was, what day it was, what year it was. I couldn't do anything."
Tests later revealed the stroke had been caused by a small hole in her heart, something that had gone undetected since birth.
She later underwent surgery to close it.
Mia tells us her family had initially though the worst
"All of my family thought that I would never walk again. They thought that I would be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.
But I was having none of that.
After countless amounts of physical therapy, speech therapy, I managed to walk out of the hospital six days later. I was left with right side weakness for a very long time, especially in my right arm."
In 2025 Mia ran the London Marathon while raising over £3,000 for the Stroke Association, she described this to us as one of the best days of her life
"I think it was it's a very important thing for me. And I still live by that to this day. Most people think that when they look at me, they're like, oh, there's no way that you've had a stroke because you look 'normal'
I just wanted to prove not only to myself that I could actually run a marathon, but I wanted to raise awareness of definitely strokes in young people, people to be able to talk about a stroke more, people to know the symptoms of how to identify a stroke.
But yeah, the marathon, it was one of the best days of my entire life"
Mia is sharing her story as part of the Stroke Association's Survival is not Enough Campaign
She tells us more about the campaign
So this campaign which was launched the beginning of this week and includes loads of different survival stories of people that have suffered strokes from the youngest of being a child all the way up until to a late adult.
It's definitely to bring awareness to strokes and how common it is for people to do that have strokes. Stroke will affect anyone. It's not categorized by age, gender, race, anything. It can affect anyone.
And I think that's the main thing that needs to be discussed a lot more. And people need to understand that."