A FORMER Ludlow schoolgirl, paralysed by a stroke nine years ago, has penned a book charting her life following the devastating condition.

Margaret Cromarty, who used to attend Ludlow Grammar School, suffered the brain-stem stroke in 1999 while attending a Mothering Sunday church service with her mother, Tenbury resident Betty Boffey.

The following 12 months were spent in hospital with Margaret, now 53, only able to communicate for the first four months through blinking her eyelids. To this day, she is still paralysed and has to rely on carers to help her with day-to-day activities at her Norfolk home.

“It’s been absolutely shattering,” said Betty, who lives in St Mary’s Close.

“She didn’t expect it to happen to her. It’s been a nightmare and I think people don’t realise the effect it can have.”

The book, Stroke - It Couldn’t Happen to Me, has been eight years in the making and made all the more difficult by Margaret having the use of only one thumb.

“She had a keyboard on the screen of her computer and used her thumb to write the words,” says Betty.

“It used to take her around two hours to write about eight lines.”

Readers of Margaret’s book will find she was far from happy with the treatment she received while in hospital and her mother says she is unsure if it was these experiences that made her pen the book, but it ‘certainly made her think’.

Margaret, a qualified nurse and mother of two grown-up daughters, also profiles her life following the stroke.

The book has a foreward by Derick Wade, a consultant in neurological rehabilitation at the Oxford Centre for Enablement.

Stroke - It Couldn’t Happen to Me, is produced by Radcliffe Publishing Ltd and is available by visiting radcliffe-oxford.com