F1 presenter and journalist Jennie Gow suffered a bad heart stroke in 2022. This stroke was due to a blood clot in an artery in her neck and it was so severe that the clot damaged the speech-associated part of her brain, impairing her ability to speak. Still, Gow recovered from this condition and is back to covering F1 in 2024.
Speaking about her miraculous recovery on ‘The Motormouth’ podcast, she highlighted that her exposure to F1 drivers and their mindset helped her a lot during this time. She recalled a few words from one of her interviews with David Coulthard that influenced her mindset and drive to recover quickly.
Thank you so much to Tim and Caroline for having me on the podcast to talk all things #F1, my book and raising #stroke awareness… https://t.co/GWu5JHz0lX
— Jennie Gow (@JennieGow) October 17, 2024
Gow said, “I remember one of my first interviews with David Coulthard and he said to me, ‘I don’t really care about the positive feedback. I only want the negative side so that I can work on improving’. That is very much me.”
She highlighted how even broadcasters often get mainly negative feedback and that drives her to improve and move on to the next thing. Gow added, “With my recovery, I was just determined to get back, it’s something very primal and I just worked really hard, relentlessly on trying to get better.”
During her recovery period, she received such strong motivational push from several people. While the 46-year-old appreciates the sympathy and good wishes, she recalled an incident of one nurse pushing her to start making efforts to resume talking.
Gow had to get angry to talk again
In an interview with BBC, Gow recalled this incident of the nurse advising her to “get angry” if she ever wanted to talk again. It was a unique but pragmatic suggestion and Gow feels grateful about it.
She said, “Somehow I just found that anger and drive to speak. If it hadn’t have been for her, I honestly don’t think I’d been speaking now.” It took a while for the F1 presenter to start speaking again, which was “frustrating” for her.
Nevertheless, she had a lot of support from the F1 community with even Lewis Hamilton being one of those people. Gow feels she felt this “heartfelt” connection of the paddock during this time and that stimulated her recovery from the stroke.
The 46-year-old has written a book on her journey named ‘How to Read F1’. The podcast’s hosts were in awe of how Gow was able to write and publish a book within just two years of her stroke.
