You may remember Mark McEwen from his days telling Americans whether to prepare for a heat wave or thunderstorm as weatherman, and later anchor, for “CBS This Morning” from 1987 to 2002.
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But in November 2005, the wind shifted in McEwen’s life when he suffered a stroke while visiting relatives in Baltimore. A hospital misdiagnosed his condition as the flu and discharged him. Two days later, on a flight back to his home in Orlando, McEwen had a massive stroke during the plane’s descent. The prognosis was so grim, friends and family flew in from around the country to say goodbye.
“I couldn’t talk, couldn’t swallow,” he says in a telephone interview from his Orlando home. “I had to learn to walk again.”
Against the odds, McEwen made a comeback.
Now, 53, McEwen shares his intimate, life-affirming journey of recovery and rehabilitation in “Change in the Weather: Life After Stroke” (Gotham Books, $26).
McEwen says he had to learn to write left-handed after being a right-handed person for the first 50 years of his life. He is still uncomfortable doing some of life’s simple things, such as reaching for a glass on a table. And if he turns around too quickly, he feels faint and dizzy.
But the husband and father of three says he is taking his new life away from television in stride.
“When one door closes, another opens,” McEwen says. “The first part of my life was TV and radio, the second part is helping people overcome this malady of strokes. I can still talk. I give speeches, I tell people it’s hard, but you do the work. You can come back.”
McEwen says he hopes to inspire other stroke survivors to push forward despite any limitations.
“You need to be stubborn if you mean to make yourself whole following a stroke,” says McEwen, who writes in the book that you need to be “focused, relentless and strong.”
Recovering from stroke has also taught McEwen to appreciate life and not take any day for granted. He says he wants others to realize how precious life is, and how it can change in an instant.
“You can be here today and gone tomorrow,” McEwen says. “You think you’re invulnerable and you’ll be here forever. Things happen to other people, they don’t happen to you. I’m here to say they can happen to you. I don’t wish that on anyone. But if it does happen to you, get back up. Life is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. These are the cards we are dealt, so let’s play cards.”