He blamed stress when his emails suddenly looked like a foreign language — the next day, doctors told him he was lucky
Oftentimes, we may ignore small health signs, dismissing them as trivial issues. However, by the time it affects us, it may have already been too late. When sixty-three-year-old Gordon Robb was checking messages from his friends, he found it strange that words on his phone appeared like a "foreign language," and blamed it on his stress. However, one visit to the ER revealed the deadly condition that was hiding inside his body, as reported by the British Heart Foundation on February 13, 2026.
Former vice president of a biotech company, Gordon Robb, was in his garden when he received messages from his friends about the Ryder Cup, and he found the words on his phone appeared strange. Robb, who was checking the messages at night, assumed that the blurry texts were due to being tired from stress. "I could see them clearly, and see who they were from, but the words meant nothing to me," he said, per The Sun. However, the following evening, while withdrawing money, he was unable to read the instructions on a cash machine. Robb began to suspect that this wasn't something trivial, as he thought it to be. Robb was planning to pay a visit to the GP; however, upon speaking about this to a cousin whose husband had died from a stroke, she insisted that he go to A&E instead. Little did he know that his cousin was about to save his life.
The doctors later broke the news that Robb had suffered a deadly haemorrhagic stroke, caused by a bleed in his brain. Surprisingly, the 63-year-old had not suffered any usual symptoms of the condition. The doctors also informed him that the inability to recognize words is one of the rarest symptoms that only 1% of stroke patients are affected by. "A group of student doctors in neurology who were brought to see me even said they would have struggled to diagnose that I had had a stroke," Robb recalled. His symptoms have now been showing improvements, although he continues to struggle with reading and catching up on finding the right words during conversations. However, Robb expressed his gratitude for diagnosing the illness sooner before it could become fatal.
The elderly man also revealed that the group of doctors in neurology who were brought to diagnose his condition struggled to conclude whether what he had was a stroke or not. "If I hadn't gone to the hospital and quickly received treatment, I could have been walking around with a ticking time bomb in my head." The elderly man emphasized the importance of always seeking help if one does not feel right about their body. Robb signed up for a study led by Professor Rustam Al-Shahi Salman at the University of Edinburgh and is among 4,000 people worldwide, which aims to understand whether clopidogrel or aspirin decreases the chances of future strokes or heart attacks.