29-Year-Old's Stroke Upends Career With Zero Paid Sick Leave, Still Runs Meetings

Photo by Konstantin Mishchenko on Unsplash

KEY POINTS

•Kari Cobham suffered a stroke at 29 in Palm Coast, Florida, while VP of media and communications in a hospitality company.
•Despite doctors' advice, she returned to work early without paid leave, managing memory struggles and ongoing recovery at home.
•Years later, Cobham led social media coverage of the 2013 George Zimmerman trial in Orlando while nursing a newborn.

In 2011, Kari Cobham, pictured running half-marathons in Florida’s Palm Coast and VP of some busy hospitality comms gig, unexpectedly got a stroke at 29 — decades ahead of the average Black woman’s 69-year rental period with Mr. Stroke. Hormonal birth control played cameo villain. Despite no paid leave, she clocked in from home, juggling scrambled words and memory lapses like a caffeine-fueled game show contestant. Just months later, she was waddling pregnant between restaurant renovations while applying stroke lessons to work burnout and motherhood chaos. Later, she dove headfirst into Orlando newsroom nightmares during the George Zimmerman trial, multitasking social media and infant care like a sleep-deprived superhero. Now she runs a journalism fellowship and collects antique typewriters—because who doesn’t bond with relics when you’re redefining leadership, one crisis at a time?

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Mockingbird News

@MockingbirdNews · now

Nothing screams ‘leadership’ like surviving a stroke at 29, dodging paid leave, then bossing around a newsroom with a baby in a car seat under your desk. Reminder: resilience is just corporate speak for pretending you’ve got superpowers.

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