Four Practices That Changed My Recovery After a Brainstem Stroke

It has been almost five and a half years since my stroke, and I have been thinking about what actually moved the needle in my recovery.

For those who do not know me, my name is Corey Diggins. In 2021 I had a brainstem stroke and a subsequent surgery that lasted more than ten hours. If I had to name the four practices that made the biggest difference in my healing, they would be these: light, loving myself, nutrition, and movement.

None of these replaced medical care. They became the daily environment I built around it. I want to share why each one mattered, what the biology behind it looks like in plain language, and how I put it to work.

1. Light

Most of us never think of light as something that changes our biology. Research in circadian biology now shows that it is one of the strongest environmental cues we have.

Light is the primary signal that sets the body’s roughly 24-hour circadian rhythm. A cluster of cells in the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN, acts as the master clock. Nearly every cell and organ also has its own local, gene-based clock. The SCN keeps those clocks in sync.

The SCN receives direct input from the retina. It then sends signals that help regulate sleep and wake, hormone release, body temperature, and aspects of repair. Two hormones are especially sensitive to light timing: melatonin, which rises in darkness and supports sleep, and cortisol, which should rise in the morning and help us wake.

Timing matters as much as brightness. Morning outdoor light tends to make us more alert earlier in the day and naturally sleepy earlier that night. Bright light after sundown does the opposite. It can push bedtime later and suppress evening melatonin. That late light is almost always artificial. Modern LEDs, phones, and computers send a heavy blue-spectrum signal into the evening, which can trick the brain into treating night as day.

That signal is also incomplete. It is often a narrow band of wavelengths, not the full spectrum we get from the sun. For a nervous system already trying to reorganize after brainstem injury, that mismatch is not a small detail. Sleep and circadian disruption are common after stroke, and sleep is one of the conditions the brain needs in order to rewire.

I treat morning outdoor light as part of rehabilitation, not as a wellness extra. It is a free cue that tells every clock in the body, “the day has started.” Evening darkness tells those same clocks it is time to repair.

Practices that helped me

• Get morning sunlight. Step outside for 10 to 30 minutes shortly after waking to anchor the internal clock. Sky light counts even on cloudy days.
• Dim the house at night. Lower indoor lighting and step away from bright screens about two hours before bed.
• Change the bulbs where you can. Full-spectrum bulbs in living areas, and red or very warm bulbs in the bedroom and bathroom for the wind-down hour.
• Keep the bedroom dark. Blackout curtains or an eye mask remove stray night light that can fragment sleep.

2. Loving Myself

Right after the stroke and surgery, hope came easily. My surgeon told me I would recover the way I had begun to recover after the initial event. The hard turn came at my first follow-up, about six months later. I felt I had made little improvement. I had also picked up new problems. That is when I lost my natural positivity, slipped into depression, and had my first panic attack.

Staying kind to myself was easy when I was hopeful. Then a doctor said the most deflating sentence I had heard: “This may be all the recovery you get.” The wind left the sail. Hopeful enthusiasm collapsed into despair.

What I decided after that first panic attack changed the rest of the story. I committed to understanding emotional trauma and to never making panic my new baseline. There are many layers to healing hurt. The decision that can come first is to treat yourself with unconditional grace.

Loving myself in that condition took the pressure off becoming someone I was not, for people who might not even be central to my life. It did not mean pretending the deficits were fine. It meant I could work on them without attacking the person doing the work.

Most of us know the Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be treated. The twist is that many of us apply that rule outward and then speak to ourselves in a voice we would never use on a friend. Harsh, negative, self-defeating language is still language the nervous system hears.

Without some measure of self-acceptance, it is also hard to give love cleanly to other people. If you cannot be honest with yourself, it is difficult to express needs without bracing for judgment. Turning the Golden Rule inward does not make a person selfish. It widens the capacity to stay in relationship without disappearing.

This was not positive thinking. It was a decision about the inner climate I would train in. Healing asked me to show up every day. I could not do that job while also being the loudest critic in the room.

3. Nutrition

Years of reading and trial and error taught me to take the gut seriously, both because of how I felt and because of what the literature keeps returning to: the gut lining, the microbiome, and inflammation talk to the brain.

One fact that still stops people is scale. The gut holds a vast microbial community. Those organisms help produce metabolites that feed the cells lining the colon, influence immune tone, and participate in energy metabolism. When that community and the barrier it lives behind are under constant strain, the rest of the body spends more time putting out fires than repairing.

I chose a lectin-light way of eating built around vegetables I tolerate, certain dairy foods, nuts and selected seeds, wild-caught fish, pasture-raised chicken, and grass-fed, grass-finished beef. I made that choice after learning that some plant proteins, including gluten and wheat germ agglutinin, can irritate the gut lining in susceptible people. Gluten is simply the lectin most people have heard of. It is not the only one.

I want to be precise here. Removing an entire class of plant proteins is not a proven cure for autoimmunity, and it is not the right protocol for every person. Cooking reduces lectins in many foods. High-quality human trials on a fully lectin-free diet are still limited. What I can say is personal and genetic. This pattern lowered the background noise in my body enough that I could feel the difference, and I use how I feel as the measuring stick.

That genetic piece matters in my case. I have a mutation in KRIT1, the gene most associated with cerebral cavernous malformations. KRIT1 is best known for its role in blood-vessel lining. Research has also found that KRIT1 is expressed in intestinal epithelium and participates in epithelial barrier maintenance, including pathways that involve tight junctions. For me, a lower-inflammation, gut-protective diet is not a trend. It’s an insurance policy to stop asking a vulnerable barrier to fight a daily food battle.

It is still more useful to add supportive foods before you rip everything else out. Pay now in attention, or pay later in symptoms. Start with what you can keep down and what leaves you clearer the next morning.

I also eat inside a time-restricted window of six to nine hours, with six as the ideal when life allows, and I fast the rest of the day. The aim is to spend more time in a fat-adapted, ketone-producing state. Ketones can serve as an alternative brain fuel. A ketogenic pattern has also been studied for mitochondrial function and, in some models, for changes in the gut microbiome. I do not treat those mechanisms as settled gospel. I treat them as a working model that has matched my energy, clarity, and recovery work.

If you want a deeper look at mitochondrial uncoupling and cellular energy, that is a separate blog [link]. For this piece, the practical point is simpler: protect the gut, lower the inflammatory load you can control, and give the brain a cleaner fuel environment to practice in.

4. Movement

After the first year I understood something that still organizes my training. The key to reclaiming movement after stroke or injury was not a new gadget, a trendy protocol, or endless hours of conventional therapy alone. It was a return to the sequence every human body uses when it first learns to move.

That idea was confirmed by my movement coach, Steve Cairns. Steve is a brainstem cavernoma thriver himself. His work challenges a long-held assumption in rehab culture: that meaningful movement recovery largely ends around six months after stroke or surgery. His neurodevelopmental-sequence approach has produced continued gains in people many years after their incident. I have seen consistent improvement more than five years out, and I am still improving.

A concept I learned from Steve became a rule: train in a challenged but successful range. Watch people rehab from brain injuries and from orthopedic injuries and a pattern appears. The ones who keep going are the ones who make the work hard enough to demand adaptation, but not so hard that failure is guaranteed. Psychologists call the feeling that follows “accomplishment feedback.” You meet a short-term standard, the nervous system files the win, and motivation has somewhere to live.

That is the foundation of my physical healing. There are many therapies, and it is easy to drown in options. The neurodevelopmental sequence is how infants build movement, which means it is also how mature movement patterns are first mapped. Stroke rehab can be painfully slow. Accomplishment feedback is what keeps wind in the sails while the map is being redrawn.

The sequence itself is simple to name and demanding to earn: prone work, rolling, crawling, kneeling, squatting, then standing and walking. Each stage rebuilds the nervous system’s map of the body from the ground up. The prize is not only bigger or smoother motion. It is ordinary function. People regain confidence in transitions that once felt impossible. They get up from the floor more safely. They reduce compensatory patterns that create secondary pain. They start to trust the body again.

These gains compound. Better floor mobility feeds upright posture. Controlled rolling restores the rotation walking needs. Stable kneeling and squatting unlock strength that isolated gym exercises often miss. Underneath all of it is neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to rewire with practice. That mechanism does not expire at the six-month mark. It slows when practice stops being specific, frequent, and successful.

A determined, consistent, show-up-for-yourself attitude is not a slogan in this work. It is the job. I no longer work a traditional nine-to-five. Years ago I decided that healing would be the job. I have stayed employed at it ever since.

What these four share

Looked at together, the four practices are not four hobbies. They are four ways of giving the nervous system better conditions.

• Light sets the daily clock so sleep and hormones can do repair work.
• Self-kindness keeps you in the work when progress is invisible.
• Nutrition lowers the inflammatory load the gut and brain have to fight through.
• Movement, practiced just beyond easy and short of failure, rebuilds the map.

Five and a half years in, I do not claim a finished recovery. I claim a method I can still show up for. The prognosis that nearly took the wind out of me was a snapshot, not a sentence. The body kept a vote. I learned to cast mine every morning.

keep the faith,

Note for readers

This is a personal account, not medical advice. Stroke recovery, diet changes, fasting, and movement progressions should be planned with your own clinicians, especially after brainstem injury. What helped me is a map, not a prescription.