LAUREN MARKS: Words were everything in my life. It was all day, every day, on stage, off stage, on the page...
HZ: Let's go back to what happened.
LAUREN MARKS: Oh, sure.
HZ: How old were you?
LAUREN MARKS: I was 27. I was an actress and a director and a PhD student in New York. And there was absolutely no warning. I mean, I was actually performing on stage when it happened. I went onstage to perform a karaoke duet.
HZ: What was the song?
LAUREN MARKS: It was ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’.
HZ: Wrong organ.
LAUREN MARKS: I know… No, it's OK to laugh, because I just really am glad I didn't die doing that. So anyways, I was on stage, I was singing... I was up, singing the song... and then I was down.

I collapsed immediately, because it was not known to me at the time but an aneurysm had ruptured in my brain and it was hemorrhaging.

HZ: An aneurysm is a weakness in a blood vessel in the brain. It’s estimated that one in fifty people have such a weakness, but most will never even know about it - only around 1 in 25,000 aneurysms causes trouble.
As she later found out, Lauren Marks had two, and one of them was that 1 in 25,000. It ruptured, and she had a stroke.
Karaoke interrupted, Lauren was taken to hospital. When she woke up, she had undergone brain surgery; but something else had changed.

LAUREN MARKS: When I woke up in the Edinburgh hospital, I had very little language: speaking, reading, writing were all dramatically affected. I probably only had about 40 or 50 words at my disposal.