Louisa's Story
Louisa has long understood the power of yoga, building strength and flexibility, quieting the mind, connecting breath to movement. Coming to the practice after years of weightlifting and a sports injury, she found yoga to be a gift she wanted to give others. So, she became a certified yoga teacher.
Then came the stroke, and a whole new understanding of what the gift of movement could mean.
At 67, Louisa was in excellent shape, exercising regularly, on no medications, recently given a clean bill of health by her doctor. Then in February 2025, one afternoon at work, she felt suddenly nauseated and dizzy. She thought it might be norovirus, lowered herself to the floor, and, when she started vomiting, she had her colleagues call an ambulance.
She was taken to White Plains Hospital, where they diagnosed the stroke. Her left side was affected, as was her speech. “I was incredulous,” she says. “I had no medical conditions whatsoever.”
After two days at WPH, she was admitted to Burke Rehabilitation Hospital. From the start, the Burke team asked about her goals, and her answer was straightforward: she wanted to get back to herself. She wanted to recover her independence, her athletic lifestyle, even her habit of talking fast and always finding the right word.
What followed was an intense week of inpatient therapy, three times a day every day. At first, just getting out of the wheelchair was difficult. Despite left-side weakness, she progressed steadily to standing, walking, doing stairs and ramps and squats. She worked with occupational therapy to recover activities of daily living, including practicing getting in and out of the shower. “Everything’s hard when one of your legs doesn’t work right, but I’m used to working hard,” she says.
Louisa moved through Burke’s inpatient program quickly. Because she was in such good shape and so committed to the practice of physical training, she sometimes finished a therapy session with time to spare. She’d put those few extra minutes to use sharing with her therapists the benefits of yoga.
“She was physically very active prior to the stroke,” notes Dr. Mery Elashvili, Director of the Stroke Program and Designated Institutional Officer of the Residency and Fellowship Programs at Burke, who treated her at Burke. “If you are healthy and highly active before the stroke, it's much easier to get back to activity.”
Dr. Elashvili recognized that all patients aren’t like Louisa. “Each patient is unique and that it is important to create a medical plan and design a rehab protocol that’s highly individualized. She also noted that upon further treatment, the team discovered Louisa did have a couple risk factors for stroke.
Louisa found one of the harder challenges to her recovery was trying to repair the mind-muscle connection she had spent decades building. For someone so physically attuned, having her left side feel unresponsive was disorienting—what she described as feeling like that part of her body “isn’t attached to me.” Even months later, back in a gym, lifting dumbbells overhead, her left arm wouldn’t respond like her right. The weights wouldn’t quite touch.
After spending a week as an inpatient, Louisa continued at Burke Outpatient Rehabilitation & Therapy – Somers, including regularly walking a treadmill with ankle weights, heavier on the left side, elevation pushed steadily higher so she could rebuild strength and balance, reconstructing what the stroke had disrupted. Although her stroke was considered mild, the recovery took the better part of a year. She still notes February 4 as the anniversary of the stroke, and, she says, “There are still times when I stop and say to myself it still feels so surreal.”
Over the year-plus, she has gotten back to her workouts, her yoga, her independent life. And now that the gift of yoga has been returned to her, she returned to Burke and shared that gift with others. She led an adaptive yoga class at Burke in May, Stroke Awareness Month, for other people recovering from the condition. The class, focused on chair yoga, weaved in breathing and meditation, with modifications for every ability level. As she has always taught—and now knows more deeply than ever—that movement can always be adapted. “Even someone who can’t get out of a wheelchair can shake out their hands, move their wrists, find a moment of stillness,” said Louisa.
Before and now, after the stroke, she lives by the power of breathwork, simple poses, and the idea of meeting your body where it is. “Whether it’s about the physical, the breath work, the meditation—it can do so much to help you get through the hard thing in front of you.”
Louisa came to Burke as a patient. She returned as a teacher—with a deep and hard-won understanding of the rehabilitation journey.
