So I took opportunities to speak as much as I could. I tried to make my fingers touch my thumb, and wiggle my toes. The neurologist told me it is all about movement you feel like your leg and arm don’t work, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to work. But hearing those words… that’s where rehab really began for me. We see you getting back onstage and being the man we know and love - the artist and singer that the world knows.” Until that moment I’d been thinking my life was over. They were leaning over my hospital bed and saying, “This is not who you are. My wife and daughter flew in from Edmonton, where they’d been visiting. When did rehabilitation begin for you, and what did it include? But already he was determined that this stroke would not define him.Īlan talked to us about his stroke, the aftermath and the long journey back - a journey that continues today. The Scottish-born singer, front man of the hugely successful Canadian synth-pop band Glass Tiger, was lying in a Toronto hospital bed, paralyzed on his right side and facing a terrifyingly uncertain future. That was August, 2015, just a few days after Alan had a stroke in his sleep at age 58. “It just looked like a bug had run across it,” Alan recalls now. When he looked at the paper nothing was legible. Lifting his wrist with the otherhand, he laid it on the paper in front of him and slowly started writing outthe lyrics to his 1986 hit song, “Don’t Forget Me (When I’m Gone).” Alan Frew picked up a pen in his right hand.His paralyzed fingers could barely grasp it.

Tiger has gone home hospital