The Night I Lost My Voice at Karaoke…

I’m completely aware that this is an extremely long blog post, and it’s taken me a while to sit down and write about this. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I wasn’t sure I was ready to fully process what happened in December and share it with those of you who’ve followed my journey. But sitting here tonight, two and a half months removed from one of the scariest mornings of my life, I feel like it’s time to open up about it.

It started in Nashville. I was there on a business trip… meeting with clients, talking strategy, strengthening relationships. That night, I went to dinner with one of our clients, then out to a karaoke bar for fun. If you know me at all, you know I love karaoke, and Nashville was one of those bucket list spots for me for karaoke. I was on stage, had the crowd going crazy, feeling great… and then about midway through the song, everything coming out of my mouth became complete jumbled nonsense. At first, I thought the alcohol had just hit me really hard all at once, so I tried to brush it off and keep singing. More jumbled nonsense. Eventually, I just kind of laughed it off and said, “I lost it, I lost it,” and walked off stage. After that, I decided to head back to the hotel. I didn’t talk to anyone for the rest of the night, so it wasn’t a massive concern at that time. I just drank some Gatorade and went to bed.

The next morning, I woke up with a weird headache. I felt hungover, but it was strange because I hadn’t drunk THAT much the night before. I went to the airport and was awaiting my flight, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. I think I drank more electrolytes that day than I ever had in my life. I had several client and internal calls that day that I was able to navigate smoothly, so I just stayed the course. By the time I got on the plane, I had this dull headache, but for the most part, I felt relatively normal. I took a nap on the flight, we landed, I got in my car, picked Ollie up from after-school care, went to the grocery store, and went home, just like any other time. But that night, after cooking the kids’ dinner, I told Telicia that I didn’t feel 100% and thought I just needed to go to bed a little early.

Then December 12th happened.

I woke up that morning having missed my alarm, so I just got up and ran upstairs to wake Ollie up for school. When I opened my mouth to say “Wake up, Ollie, it’s time to get up and get ready for school,” the same thing I say every single day, that is not what came out. It was a mess. A jumbled mess of nonsense, just like the karaoke stage. I tried again. Same thing. I paced around, slightly panicked. I still woke him up and got him dressed, but any time I tried to talk to him, it made no sense. He looked at me, confused. “Huh? What, Daddy?” He was trying to understand me, but I quickly hurried him to eat, loaded him in the car, and drove him to school. He was late, so I had to walk him to the office to check him in. When I walked in, the lady at the front desk said, “Good morning!” I tried to say it back, but it was a huge struggle to get anything coherent out.

Once I got back to my car, I frantically drove down the street, trying to read the street signs out loud. I couldn’t. A few minutes and many failed attempts later, I called my mom, crying, saying, “Mom, I think I’m having a stroke.”

I remember sitting in my car, looking in the mirror, doing these frantic mouth exercises, moving my lips and tongue and jaw, trying to will the muscles to cooperate, trying to force my brain to remember what it had always done automatically. It didn’t work.

For those who don’t know, I’m a professional communicator. That’s not just what I do for a living… It’s who I am. I’ve spent my entire career in rooms, on calls, on stages, using my voice to persuade, to connect, to close deals. My job as VP of Enterprise Sales at Raptive is built on relationships, presence, and the ability to articulate complex ideas in real time with sophisticated buyers. And suddenly, I couldn’t form a basic sentence.

The ER. The scans. The words on my MyChart portal that I’ll never forget: focal occlusion in the distal M1 segment of the right MCA. Translation: a clot was blocking blood flow to part of my brain. I was having a stroke. At 38 years old. After years of eating right and exercising regularly. None of that mattered. The doctors were direct with me… the next several hours were critical. They talked about brain tissue that was “stunned” versus brain tissue that was already dead. About collateral blood flow, keeping things alive. About what might come back and what might not.

I’d be lying if I said the fear wasn’t constant. It lived in my chest for days, cold and heavy in the hospital. I’m a solo parent with three children. If I couldn’t speak fluently, what would I do? Who would I even be? I kept testing myself obsessively… saying words out loud, listening to how broken they sounded, hating the gap between what I wanted to say and what actually came out. Some moments, I felt hopeful. At other moments, I was convinced this was permanent, and my life as I knew it and my career were over.

The crazy thing about a crisis is how it shows you who’s really in your corner. My mom dropped everything to fly up from Florida to be there. My cousin Emma showed up with love and support when I needed it most. And Telicia, my girlfriend who lives over an hour away and has her own demanding career, spent weeks of her vacation time in Charlotte helping take care of my boys and me.

That last part still gets me when I think about it.

We had Christmas plans. The kids and I were supposed to fly to Florida, spend time with family, and hit Universal Studios in Orlando. It was going to be our thing. The stroke blew all of that up completely. I couldn’t travel. I could barely function. At first, the change was jarring, and I felt like I was letting my boys down, like the stroke was stealing Christmas on top of everything else it had already taken from me.

But then something shifted. Telicia was here. All of my kids were here. We built a different Christmas together in Charlotte… She and her daughter, Willow, became part of our family rhythm in a way that hadn’t happened before. The forced change created space for something beautiful to take root. I’m genuinely grateful for that, even though I never would have chosen the path that got us there.

I also need to talk about my team at Raptive, because their response meant more than I can adequately express. When I reached out to tell them what happened, I didn’t know what to expect. I’m in a role where presence matters, where showing up, literally and figuratively, is the job. I was terrified they’d lose patience, lose confidence, start wondering if they needed someone who could actually perform. Instead, I got grace. The concern was genuine. The patience was real. They gave me space to heal without making me feel like my position was in jeopardy. In a world where business often feels transactional, that mattered more than I can say.

Speech therapy became my second job for the next several weeks. The exercises felt ridiculous at first… exaggerated mouth movements, repeating phrases over and over, reading passages out loud while a therapist analyzed every syllable. But I showed up for every session and attacked every exercise. If you know anything about me, you know that I’m not afraid of the hardship and what it means to grind through adversity, to trust a process even when the light and the end of the tunnel feels invisible. That mentality kicked in, and I just put my head down and worked.

Slowly, it started to come back. The slurring decreased. The pauses in my speaking cadence shortened. The fluency returned. I graduated from in-home speech therapy around week ten, and I went back to work, and at this point, I’m mostly back to normal from a speech perspective. There are still moments where I notice things that used to be automatic, but they’re increasingly rare. I can do my job. I can be present for my kids. I can have a conversation without constantly monitoring myself.

The doctors have been both shocked and thrilled with how quickly I’ve been able to bounce back. They attribute a lot of it to my work ethic and my desire to get back the things that I’d lost through the stroke. I’ll take that.

But I’d be lying if I said this experience hasn’t changed something in me.

I thought I did everything right. I’m 37. I exercised regularly. I ate fairly well. I took care of myself. And I still had a stroke. That’s not fair. It’s also just life… Some of this could be genetics, some is anatomy, some is just bad luck. You can control what you can control, and the rest is completely out of your hands. I already knew life was fragile… I’ve lived through loss before that taught me that lesson in the most painful way possible. But there’s something different about your own body, your mind betraying you, about waking up and finding that a fundamental part of who you are has been compromised. It’s humbling in a way that’s hard to fully explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.

The morning I was getting ready to be discharged from the hospital, I sat there and typed something into the notepad on my phone. I don’t know exactly why I felt compelled to write it down… maybe for a book that I may never write, but I needed to capture what I was feeling before I lost it, or maybe I just needed to remind myself of something true. But I wrote this:

“I don’t know if my voice will come back the way it was. I don’t know what I’ll say if it does. But I know today will be better than yesterday, because it always has been; even when I couldn’t imagine how. That’s enough to keep fighting. One moment at a time. One word at a time.”

I still believe that. I believed it when I couldn’t speak clearly, and I believe it now that I mostly can. Some version of that thought has carried me through every hard season of my life.

If you had shown me the script for my life a few years ago, I would have handed it back and said try again. I never imagined losing my wife at 33. I never planned on raising three boys as a single father. I never expected to be navigating a new relationship in my late 30s. And I certainly never thought I’d be recovering from a stroke before 40. But here we are. Life doesn’t ask permission before it changes on you.

What I can control is what I do with whatever time I have left. I can choose to shut down or remain open. I can focus on what was lost or on what remains. I can live in fear of more pain or in hope of more joy. I’m choosing to move forward… not away from the hard things, but carrying them with me into whatever comes next.

I’m grateful for my health returning. I’m grateful for my mom, for Emma, for Telicia, and the way she showed up when it mattered most. I’m grateful for my friends, who continue to show up for me in various ways. I’m grateful for colleagues who treated me like a human being instead of a liability. I’m grateful to be back at work, doing the work that I love in an industry that I love, with people that I also love and genuinely enjoy doing business with. And I’m grateful to still be here, still be speaking, still be raising my boys, and building a life worth living.

We have limited control over how much time we have left on this earth, but I’m grateful to have the opportunity to keep moving forward.

Maybe one of these days, I’ll get back to karaoke 🙂

Talk soon,
Walt