Against All Odds

At 36, a health crisis saw Jolene Anderson given the news that she may never have children of her own. But, three years on, the popular Australian actress exclusively tells Tiffany Dunk she’s proved the experts wrong.

Striding out of the water after an ocean swim at Bundeena, Royal National Park in NSW, Jolene Anderson contentedly flopped down on a towel to read the novel she was halfway through. Cracking open the pages though, something was wrong. The words in front of her wouldn’t form. Even though she knew they should be familiar, she just couldn’t seem to make sense of them.

At first, she thought she’d been bitten by a tick during the bushwalk she’d taken earlier in the day. Trying not to panic, she spent the next 15 minutes trying to make out the word “path”. “But I couldn’t read it and I couldn’t get past that word to form a sentence,” she tells The Weekly of that terrifying day, which she is speaking about publicly for the first time. Soon, her calm dissipated and she made a frantic call to her mother who urged her to go to the hospital.

“Not wanting to make a fuss, I was like, ‘No, I’m fine,’” Jolene recalls. “I was crying and I don’t know if I was slurring my words. But I went to the local doctor and she took one look at me and said to go to the hospital.”

Arriving at emergency wearing “cut-off denim shorts with a bikini, wet hair and sand everywhere,” Jolene spent nine hours sitting alone while tests were conducted.

“I still thought maybe it was a tick until I heard people say TIA – transient ischaemic attack – which is what they call a mini stroke,” she recounts.

Similar to a stroke, a TIA is caused when there is a temporary block in the blood supply to the brain. And while symptoms generally dissipate within 24 hours – in Jolene’s case, it had passed by the time she arrived at the hospital – it can be a warning of a more major stroke or heart attack to follow days later.