Mansfield Brock was driving on a highway in Connecticut when he suffered his first stroke.

Speaking to the Hamilton Rotary Club on Tuesday night, the veteran educator said the road in front of him suddenly became like a turned-off television set with a diagonal line running across it.

He began to slow down and, when his wife suggested that they pull into a nearby motel, Mr Brock struggled to recognise the word.

“This happened suddenly,” he said “I had no symptoms. We went to the motel and they called the ambulance.”

Mr Brock endured his second, more significant stroke several years later in 2015, which left him unable to speak or move his left side.

“I lost all my memory completely,” he said. “I knew my wife and my immediate family, but I didn’t know my first cousins. It was bad.”

While he asked his son in writing to cut off his left arm at his shoulder, his son — a doctor — responded that he could make a full recovery.

“I had never in my life seen someone recover from that kind of disability, but he said I could recover,” Mr Brock said.

“That’s when I started my rehabilitation in the intensive care unit.”

Mr Brock said that over time, the work began to pay off as his speech and movement gradually returned.

One day, he said his memory came flooding back like a “rush of water”.

“It’s possible to recover your physical and mental properties if you work at it,” he said. “I worked at it and I haven’t given up.”

His comments came during a panel discussion organised as part of World Stroke Day.

Sandro Fubler, the founder and chief executive of Evolution Health Centre, said the key to recovery was neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to adapt and evolve, creating new pathways.

“That one word is the biggest hope for anyone that has had a stroke,” Dr Fubler said.

“It means structurally, you have billions of neurons, but functionally, you can circumnavigate. You can create a new pathway.

“If you have an arm that is not working, you can basically create a new pathway to make it work again.”

Kim Watkins, a physiotherapist, said that a recent pilot study found that one of the greatest challenges for stroke patients in Bermuda was “disjointed” service.

“They get their rehabilitation from the hospital, and that is great, but once they were discharged they found disjointed service once they were in the community,” Dr Watkins said.

“Everyone was trying to navigate the system on their own, which is really challenging.

“After you have had a stroke incident there are so many things that happen all at once and you are trying to figure out what you need to do.

“There was no direct pathway, and no support once they had been discharged.”

Dr Watkins said survey respondents also reported that insurance only covered a limited number of treatment sessions, leaving many to pay out of pocket for specialised services.

Adriene Berkeley, a psychologist with a specialisation in neuropsychiatry, of PsyNeu, said that while mental health is often treated as something separate from physical health, the two are intrinsically linked.

“It is such a huge adjustment to go through an extreme event and your identity has changed, you may not be able to work, you can’t socialise,” she said. “Your entire life is flipped and you are sort of left alone.”

She said that neuroplasticity meant the brain can continue to change and adapt even in senior years.

“There is this misconception that once you reach 30 there’s not much you can do, but there is so much, but there is a lack of information and a lot of misinformation,” Dr Berkeley said.

“If we had the different services work together, we would have a complete rehabilitation model like some of our counterparts in the UK and the US.”