Kevin Sorbo would have been the last person you’d expect to have a debilitating stroke. At 38, the brawny actor was portraying Hercules on television. He looked every bit the part and suffered from none of the usual risk factors for stroke, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity.
“I had none of those things,” he tells Newsmax Health. “I was in great shape. I’m like a weird anomaly.”




For about three months before the stroke, which struck Sorbo in 1997, he had been experiencing a dull ache in his left shoulder and numbness and coldness in three fingers of his left hand. His physician found a lump in his shoulder and decided a biopsy was in order. However, a chiropractic treatment the same day of the doctor’s visit proved the lump wasn’t cancer as Sorbo feared. Doctors believe it was actually an aneurysm that forced blood clots into his brain when the chiropractor adjusted Sorbo’s neck.
Sorbo suffered two strokes affecting his center of balance and one affecting his vision, which is still impaired by 10 percent in both eyes.
Instead of shooting a movie, Sorbo spent the next four months in intense rehabilitation, trying to get his life back, an experience he recounts in his book, “True Strength,” now in paperback.
“I had to learn to walk again,” he recalls. “The first few months — it was a battle for me just to get out of bed and even go the bathroom.”
His neurologists told him that whatever gains he had made eight months after the stroke was about how far he could expect to improve. But eight months after having a stroke, Sorbo still felt pretty bad and hadn’t recovered as well as he had hoped. And he was not going to settle for that.

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“It took me three full years to feel normal again …,” he says. “It took a long time to get that recovery to come back. I just kept pushing.”
Two things were working in Sorbo’s favor: His herculean fitness level before the stroke and his fiancé, actress Sam Jenkins, who offered him tremendous support. The couple married in 1998 shortly after Sorbo’s stroke.
He continued with his rehabilitation, incorporating complimentary therapies including yoga, acupuncture, and meditation, and focused on his strong will to get better. He went on to star in two more seasons of “Hercules,” working first an hour a day and eventually nine hours a day two years later. When the series folded he went on to star in “Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda” TV series for five years, and he has appeared in more than 40 movies.
“I’ve passed every physical exam that any of the studios want to throw at me,” he says.
These days, Sorbo is traveling the country promoting his book, which he says is about “triumph over tragedy,” and telling people his story.
“I am meeting people who are not only stroke survivors but people who are heart attack survivors, people who were car crash survivors, cancer survivors,” he says. “Everyone who has been reading this book is saying this book has totally made them re-evaluate the way they’re looking at their own recovery, and it motivated them to push past what they thought they are capable of doing.”

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