Finding Joy and Purpose After Stroke

After experiencing multiple strokes, Jennifer Coomer-Adkins used her platform to promote brain injury awareness, stroke education, and the Brain Injury Association of America.

On a Friday in early March of 2025, Jennifer Coomer-Adkins was following her normal weekday morning routine. She had just dropped her kids off at school and was in the middle of her daily grocery shopping trip when she started to feel “off.”

“I could feel my face drooping a little bit, and I could feel some tingling on my right side, with some numbness in my hand and arm,” she recalls. She also started to develop a painful headache, and decided to go home and see if getting some rest would help her symptoms subside.

Things got progressively worse. By the end of that weekend, her husband insisted that they go to the hospital because he suspected her symptoms were the result of a stroke.

He was right.

In fact, Jennifer experienced three strokes: one in the grocery store, one while she was at the hospital, and an older one that doctors weren’t able to connect to a specific date. “They had no idea when or how I had it; it was just there on the scan,” Jennifer explains.

Jennifer spent a week in the hospital, followed by months of speech therapy, occupational therapy, and physical therapy to address the deficits she had as a result of her strokes, including her ability to walk. She still struggles with word finding and memory retention, she says, but the physical symptoms like her facial droop have subsided.

Because she didn’t experience many of the physical deficits that stroke survivors often have—for instance, losing the ability to speak, eat, or swallow—Jennifer said she struggled with a sense of survivor’s guilt. Still, she shared her own story and her challenges—losing the ability to read (something that was especially painful to her as an avid reader) and having to step back from her women-centered event planning business, for example—and connected with people whose family members or loved ones had also experienced a stroke. “I would talk to them about my survivor’s guilt, and they would tell me, ‘You don’t understand. You’re being the eyes, the ears, the hands and the feet of people who would otherwise not be able to speak. You’re helping on their behalf.’”

Being a voice and advocate for stroke has become part of Jennifer’s business, Plan for Joy With Jennifer, which is back up and running.

Originally a business for teaching women to find joy even after trauma and abuse, Jennifer has since incorporated health education for women into her business.

“I did not connect the dots that a stroke was a brain injury when it first happened,” she says. She also wasn’t aware that sometimes women experience different stroke symptoms than men, or of the BE FAST method for recognizing and acting on stroke symptoms.

One of her go-to resources for stroke and brain injury education, she says, has been the Brain Injury Association of America.

A couple of months after her strokes, Jennifer was looking for information and support. The hospital where she was treated had sent her home with some resources, including a link to BIAA’s website. Her occupational therapist also shared tools and resources from BIAA. Webinars, YouTube videos, and tools for helping with organization and time management have been particularly helpful, Jennifer says. “There was just such a wide variety of different tools and resources to help out, and to support, and to keep going.”

When she reached out to BIAA to inquire about fundraising opportunities and participating in the National Luminary of the Year campaign, she was struck by the sense of concern, help, and support she received from the people she spoke with—something that differentiated the organization from others she had contacted.

It inspired her to use her business to support BIAA in return.

“Before my strokes, when I would hold big events during the year, I usually tried to find a nonprofit to support with each of these events,” she says.

Now, she supports BIAA.

“I have this gift of hosting events, getting vendors, gathering people, and inspiring, connecting, and celebrating women. Now I have attached BIAA to my fundraising with that.”

On the one-year anniversary of her strokes, Jennifer hosted a women’s book fair event, which raised money for the 2026 National Luminary of the Year campaign.

“I love helping,” she says. “And I feel like I just got so much support, whether it was the resources, the in-person meetings, the online meetings. I just want to help others who might be in a similar situation.”