On a trip to Park City, Utah, movie producer Jonathan Bogner sold a horror film, connected with colleagues at the Sundance Film Festival, then hit the ski slopes. He felt winded while skiing, but he kept going. The day after arriving home in Beverly Hills, California, Bogner woke up early to shower.
When he glanced at the shampoo and soap bottles, the words looked like they were written in a foreign language. His heart raced and he sat on the shower bench. His wife, Cindy, and son Oliver, then 15, wondered where he was for so long.
They found him in the bathroom. Oliver called 911. When the paramedics arrived, Jonathan couldn't speak.
In the emergency room, he learned he'd had two massive strokes that caused aphasia, or language loss from brain damage. He also had myocarditis, or an inflamed heart muscle, possibly caused by a virus. "Your heart is failing," the doctor said.
Jonathan, who was 45, stayed in the hospital for two weeks. Doctors put in his chest an implantable cardioverter defibrillator, a device that would deliver a shock to his heart if it stopped or fell into an abnormal rhythm. He did speech therapy and relearned numbers.
He kept calling Cindy, Candy. "This could be as good as it gets," the therapist told Cindy. Jonathan went home to heal.
He wasn't well enough to show up on set for a movie he was supposed to produce. He continued with weekly speech therapy. The ensuing stretch was especially challenging for Cindy.
In addition to caring for Jonathan, she also .
