How a Stroke at 29 Redefined Leadership for Kari Cobham

In 2011, Kari Cobham suffered a stroke at the age of 29. At the time, she was serving as vice president of media and communications for a busy hospitality company in Palm Coast, Florida. Despite appearing to be in peak physical health while training for a half-marathon, the health crisis struck without warning. The stroke was later traced, in part, to hormonal birth control.

Cobham was forced to take weeks off work but returned sooner than doctors advised because she did not have paid leave. She continued to work from home for several months as she could not drive. During this period, she struggled with physical fatigue, memory issues, and scrambled speech while trying to keep up with the demands of a fast-moving team without formal HR support. The experience fundamentally changed her approach to work and leadership.

Less than a year later, Cobham became pregnant with her first child. She continued to work through renovations and new openings, but she held onto the lessons from her stroke recovery. She realized that leadership is not about pushing through pain but about knowing when to adjust and create space for life changes. This realization led her to a new role in journalism, where she faced the high-pressure coverage of the George Zimmerman trial while nursing a newborn. These cumulative experiences taught her that leadership in crisis is about building trust and capacity in others, rather than trying to be everywhere at once.

A stroke at 29 was not in Kari Cobham's career plan. Statistics show that strokes can happen at any age, with one in five women in the US experiencing one. However, the average age for Black women is 69, meaning Cobham was decades ahead of schedule. At the time, she had just returned from a trip home to Trinidad and Tobago and was seemingly in the best shape of her life.

Following the stroke in 2011, Cobham returned to work within weeks. Without paid leave, she had to return sooner than her doctors recommended. She worked from home for a few months because she was unable to drive. Cobham loved the challenge of her work and had previously thrived on the fast pace, but she was still physically recovering.

Recovery was difficult. Cobham was winded by the smallest physical activity and struggled with memory. Words sometimes came out scrambled or not at all. She was in and out of outpatient appointments. Despite these challenges, she tried to keep up with new initiatives as if nothing had happened. Her coworkers were sympathetic, but with no formal HR and a fast-moving team, there was little room for weakness.

She noticed when she struggled to articulate herself or keep up, and she felt like she was drowning, fighting to heal while failing at work. She described the sensation as running on a treadmill set too fast. Slowly, she began to understand that recovery required both time and empathy. She realized that as leaders, they owe people the time and understanding she hadn't known how to ask for.

Less than a year after her stroke, Kari Cobham was pregnant with her first child. On top of her stroke recovery, she was helping to open two new attractions and restaurants. It seemed to be an easy pregnancy, and she stayed active with yoga and running. She often walked between properties under renovation to keep up with the job's demands.

However, she held onto the lessons she had learned during her stroke recovery. She realized she needed balance, not burnout, if she wanted to manage both her health and motherhood. This was a turning point: she realized that leadership is not about pushing through, but knowing when to take stock, adjust, and create space for the life changes that matter more than work.

Although she was not leading a team at that specific moment, the experience shaped the leader she wanted to be and the culture she wanted to work in. Her first big adjustment was finding a new job. Eager for a return to journalism, she joined a TV newsroom in Orlando months later as executive producer of social media, bringing a new baby with her.

In her new role in Orlando, Kari Cobham immediately plunged into high-pressure coverage of the George Zimmerman trial in 2013. Her job was to build a social media strategy around the trial and daily reporting while co-leading a digital team. At home, she was nursing and sleep-deprived. At work, she dozed off in morning pitch meetings.

She frequently caught every daycare illness her daughter brought home and often had to duck out for urgent care visits or daycare pickups. On those days, coverage had to move forward without her. Years later, she still laughs with teammates about the chaos they survived, from publishing stories while her infant daughter slept in her car seat beneath her desk to racing through relentless breaking news days.

That season taught her something fundamental: leadership in crisis is not about being everywhere at once. It is about building trust and capacity in others to carry the work forward. After a few more years in various digital news roles, she moved into nonprofit news and now runs a journalism fellowship for alumni of historically Black colleges and universities.

Looking back, the stroke and the experiences that followed taught Kari Cobham important lessons she still carries with her. She emphasizes that healing takes time and space, and people take cues from leaders. Leaders must model this if they want their teams to know it. Knowing when and how to take stock of life and making accommodations are key.

She believes that trust and delegation empower teams to thrive without needing one person to hold everything together. Boundaries and balance are essential for sustaining both the pace and the people. Most of all, she has learned that a crisis does not disqualify anyone from leading; it simply reshapes how we lead, pushing us toward empathy, clarity, and adaptability.

These days, when someone on her team needs time, she thinks back to 29-year-old me, trying to outrun recovery. She gives them the space she wishes she had given herself and encourages them to see resilience differently—not powering through at all costs, but creating conditions that allow us to carry on. She thought a stroke at 29 would derail her career; instead, it redefined her philosophy on work and leadership.