He also rediscovered the pleasure of speaking to his five grandchildren, all of whom are under the age of six.
“They were perfectly content to speak slowly to me because they spoke slowly themselves,” he said, adding with a laugh that “they were they only people who were patient with me.”
Mark Bayley, the medical director of neuro-rehabilitation programs at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, said about a third of stroke victims suffer some sort of language difficulties. But few recover the way Mr. Strosberg has.
“For him to recover so quickly is really quite remarkable. It’s a testament really to his hard work and the intensity of treatment that he had,” Dr. Bayley said, adding that some stroke patients without the money for extra treatments but the same determination could still regain their ability to speak, but likely not as quickly.
Mr. Strosberg first dipped his toe back into a courtroom last Aug. 31, making a brief appearance before a judge in Windsor to argue against a motion in a class-action case, and he was granted special permission to videotape the proceedings.
“I won at the end. And it was exhilarating to me. The issues weren’t important at all,” Mr. Strosberg said.
That experience of arguing a case after his stroke taught him a valuable lesson, he said, now that he speaks more slowly: All lawyers should take their time.
“Many lawyers speak too fast,” he said. “They think they have a minute or two minutes, and they race to get the most words in a minute. That’s wrong. You have to think about the concept of the judge being persuaded. If you take your time, he’ll or she’ll get the idea simpler and faster.”
His daughter Sharon Strosberg, who like her brother Jay is also a lawyer at her father’s firm, was there and says it was an emotional day, capping months of not knowing how just how much of his speech her father could recover: “He kept saying, ‘I will be back, I will be back.’ And we all started to believe it.”
In two months, Mr. Strosberg will face an eight-week trial in a class-action case involving Manulife Financial Corp. and its demutualization.
Mr. Strosberg, bounding around his Spartan Toronto condo explaining his ordeal, stressed that he is indebted to the lawyers for Manulife – Torys LLP’s Sheila Block and Wendy Matheson – for agreeing to postpone the trial while he recovered.
He has lost 40 pounds, meditates and naps every day, does yoga, and says he has changed his outlook on life.
“I was so grateful for being alive, I forgave anyone that was being mean to me, or did bad things to me,” Mr. Strosberg said. “… And I asked forgiveness for everyone that I did badly to. Then I was free. … I’m the happiest man in the world.”
