We spent three months in speech therapy before I learned to say the letter 'A.' Eventually, after about a year and a half, I could say 'yup,' 'nope,' and 'bathroom.' I could also say 'I love you' and a few other phrases but not much more. When we first returned home, I could barely speak at all. “In my case my brain was functioning, and I could understand what Mary said to me, but I could not respond in anything close to a sentence. Randy describes his challenges with the condition in his book: “Aphasia is basically a short between the brain and the lips,” explains Mary. About 25 to 40 percent of stroke survivors suffer from this communication disorder called aphasia, according to the National Aphasia Association. One of Randy’s biggest obstacles has been trying to get back his ability to speak.
“He had a hard time focusing and seeing but all of that came back to perfect,” says Mary. To make matters worse, Randy also dealt with vision problems during his first six to nine months home from the hospital. “He didn’t grasp what they were and what to do with them,” says Mary, “but he slowly regained all that understanding.” When he first came home from the hospital, certain everyday objects - such as a remote control, a television, and a toilet - didn’t make sense to him.
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Just before Thanksgiving of 2013, Travis was finally able to go home.įor the next two and a half years, he devoted four to five hours every single day to rehabilitation to learn how to walk again and regain control of the right side of his body.Įarly in his recovery, he struggled with some comprehension problems related to his stroke. Over the course of five and a half months in two hospitals, Travis had three bouts of pneumonia, three tracheostomies, and two brain surgeries. I hadn’t quit then - and I wasn’t about to quit now,” he wrote. “I had braved numerous storms in my life and had frequently faced overwhelming odds, times when others had advised me to give up. Travis wrote that he was determined to get better and return to doing the things he loved in life. Travis detailed his struggles and his hope for the future in his book, Forever and Ever, Amen: A Memoir of Music, Faith, and Braving the Storms of Life.Įven during his bleakest moments. He and Mary started The Randy Travis Foundation, which provides support for victims of stroke and cardiovascular diseases. Travis is also committed to helping others overcome similar struggles. Because the stroke has severely limited his ability to talk, Mary stays by his side at most times to help him communicate. Now, six years post injury, Travis spends most of his time at his ranch with Mary, and attends a weekly Bible study class in a nearby town. Mary turned to the doctors and told them to get on board keeping him alive. “A little tear fell out of his eye and I knew he wasn’t ready to give up.” “I went to his bedside and asked him if he wanted to keep fighting,” says Mary, who became Travis’s wife in 2015. Doctors suspected that a blood clot had formed in his heart and traveled to his brain, causing the trauma.ĭuring a second coma when Travis’s lungs had collapsed and he was placed on life support, medical providers told his then-fiancee, Mary, that he had a 1 percent chance of survival and she should consider taking him off life support. When he came out of that coma 48 hours later, physicians discovered that Travis had suffered a stroke, which had affected the entire central region of his left brain. With DCM, heart chambers enlarge and do not pump blood sufficiently.Īt one point, his heart stopped completely and doctors rushed to put him on life support and into an induced coma, a procedure that can help protect the brain. Travis was admitted to Heart Hospital Baylor in Dallas, where he was treated for dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) caused by a viral infection of the heart.
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The 54-year-old had a packed schedule with tour dates and an acting role in an upcoming TV pilot. In July 2013, country music star Randy Travis went to the emergency room complaining of congestion.
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