Cranston Dunkin’ Surprises Local Stroke Survivor Who Has Been Practicing His Coffee Order as Speech Therapy

Photo by Derek Delahunt

With the way Lizzy McMahon is able to rattle off medical terms, one might think she was a healthcare professional at some point in her life.

In reality, the Cranston-based wife and mother is someone who dove headfirst into a traumatic experience and decided to make the best of it.

On October 11 last year, Lizzy’s husband, Rich McMahon, suffered two strokes — one of which was catastrophic. Rich doesn’t have much recollection of the experience, but for Lizzy and their elementary-age son, Little Rich (aka Richie), it’s a day they will never forget.

The two were visiting their storage unit when Rich texted saying he had felt a pop in his neck and was starting to see flashing lights. At the time, Lizzy chocked the symptoms up to an ocular migraine, but Rich had the intuition to get checked out at Kent just as a precaution. Doctors at first said everything was fine, but then as he was leaving, his right side went numb.

Rich was, in fact, having a stroke.

He was given a clot buster and Lizzy rushed to meet him at the hospital. While Rich was conscious and able to speak, the situation was deemed serious enough that he was transferred to the stroke unit at Rhode Island Hospital. At that point, no serious damage was detected, but staff wanted to keep him overnight for observation. By 6 a.m. he was rushed into surgery for an emergency thrombectomy.

“Your carotid artery has three layers and the first inside layer tore, and then the blood was diverting behind it, and it was clotting. That was the initial stroke: it was blocking out the blood flow to the brain,” Lizzy explains. “So then when he took the clot buster, it breaks up any clot in your body, which they didn’t know why his arteries clogged, they thought maybe it would be a stent. When they went in, they figured out he had a carotid artery dissection. The clot buster broke up the clot but one of the clots was too big, and it went to his brain. And that was the stroke that did all the damage.”

It was touch and go for a while afterwards, but by day five Rich was deemed medically stable. Still he was nowhere out of the woods: a neurologist told Lizzy that he would most likely never walk unassisted again, need a feeding tube and never have a full conversation with her again.

Photo by Derek Delahunt

“And I was like, ‘No. I don’t accept that.’ She said, ‘you don’t have to accept it, but I just want to prepare you for the reality.’ And I was like, ‘That’s not my reality, no way.’ He’s only 53, you know?’

Rich soon transferred to Vanderbilt Rehabilitation Center in Newport. By this point Lizzy says on a scale of 1 to 100, he was assessed at a three. But another neurologist gave them hope.

“Dr. Perelstein, she was amazing. She was like, ‘Anecdotally, we don’t have the evidence for how somebody young recovers.’ The percentage has gone up a lot in young people, but it’s typically an older person’s condition,” Lizzy recalls. But she said, ‘If you can get him to try to talk, then we’re good.’ If he’s trying to talk, his brain will recognize that something is not working and it work really hard to repair itself.’

They had written “We love you” on a big white board in Rich’s room, and Little Rich would regularly ask, “Dad, can you read what that says?” Eventually, Rich was able to read and say the word “we.”

For this interview, Rich prefaced that he would let Lizzy do a lot of the talking as he knew some of the words not be as clear when I listened back to the recording. This is a new dynamic for their relationship, as Rich was always the life of the party while Lizzy preferred to remain behind the scenes. But the one thing that hasn’t changed is the couple’s sense of humor.

“For the first two weeks it was just ‘we, we, we, we, we, we,’” Rich says with a laugh. “She was like STOP!”

“I was like ‘Yes, ‘we,’ we get it!’” she adds. “I also used to say, ‘I’m mad at you. Now I have to be the one talking all the time. This is bullshit. Get it together!’”

And soon enough, he did. One day, she and Little Rich were chatting away while visiting Rich at rehab when he suddenly started counting.

“It was coming back,” he says.

Lizzy isn’t sure why exactly, but they eventually decided to introduce cusses into his rotation of practice words and phrases. Rich likes to think that the absurdity of it helped speed things along and make the process feel more normal and familiar (he is a Boston native, after all). Lizzy, who by happenstance had already established the TikTok handle @chaostocomeback prior to the stroke, decided to film and upload the experience not only because it was funny, but because it was a way to document his recovery.

@chaostocomeback “REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE.” (Mufasa voice) #strokesurvivor #strokerecovery #strokespouse ♬ original sound – Chaos to Comeback

“Sometimes, it felt like I was not even there. It felt like I was watching what was going on from outside perspective,” she reflects. “I wanted to keep a record of it because I thought, if he recovered, I wanted to be able to look back at how far he came. Also to rub it in his face like, ‘look what I did [for you]!”

The first video went up early Halloween morning, and by the time she and Little Rich went trick or treating that evening, her phone was blowing up with notifications. By the next day, it had a million views. Today, it’s just shy of 17 million, while the page itself has amassed more than 30,000 followers. The family uploads regularly with the content spanning everything from educational PSAs about different stroke signs and side effects, progress updates and fun family moments. Their fans are mostly made up of well-wishers and speech and occupational therapists, along with a niche community people who can relate to the McMahons’ situation.

“A lot of people who weren’t talking to others [in the stroke community], but they found us and talked to us, like, ‘What did you do [to recover]?” Rich says.

“I joke with my friends, ‘I am super famous in the stroke community, just so you guys know. It’s a weird community to be famous in, but I am!’” Lizzy says with a laugh. “There seems to be a void in this area in terms of support. One in four people have a stroke in their lifetime. In the U.S., a person has a stroke every forty seconds. It’s very prevalent. But unless you know somebody who’s had a stroke, you don’t know anything about it. I didn’t know anything about it.”

But, as Rich points out, she made it her mission to learn as much as possible during his recovery, spending hours upon hours online researching how the brain, different treatments and so on.

“His stroke was in the Broca’s area of the brain, which controls speech. When they said he has aphasia, I didn’t know what that is, so I looked it up,” she says. I learned there’s two different kinds, and that there’s no cure, but you can create new neural pathways through repetition.”

While the practice may have started with the cursing videos, one commenter eventually asked, “What’s next?” Lizzy replied: “His coffee order.” It got 30k likes.

Photo by Derek Delahunt

Like many of us New Englanders, Rich got headaches without his daily caffeine fix while in rehab, so Lizzy frequently brought him Dunkin’ during her visits. Getting him back into the routine of ordering his own — a large iced with two creams and two sugars, for those wondering — was a natural next step. His speech therapist was on board, so they started practicing both at home and eventually on location at his neighborhood Dunkin in Cranston.

Lizzy uploaded “Day one of practicing his coffee order until Dunkin makes him their spokesperson” on January 31, and the followers ran with it. People loved seeing Rich’s journey — which wasn’t always linear, but clearly showed improvement over time — and felt that he deserved recognition for his efforts. Every time a new video was uploaded, the comments were flooded with @dunkin tags. It wasn’t long before the coffee company took notice.

So, on Thursday, March 5 — which would mark Day 30 of Rich’s coffee order challenge — Dunkin’ greeted and surprised the McMahons at its 1288 Oaklawn Ave. location in Cranston with one year of free coffee, doughnuts emblazoned with the family’s pictures, and a bucket of fun Dunkin’ merch, plus tickets to the Red Sox’ season opener this spring. The latter is especially meaningful to both Riches as the elder is a longtime fan and the younger just recently started playing rec baseball. (See the surprise from their POV here).

Photo by Derek Delahunt

“We’re so grateful,” says Lizzy. “We could have never imagined at the beginning that something like this would happen.”

Dunkin’s generous gifts and recognition is the cherry on top of what has been a whirlwind five months.

“Throughout, [Little Rich and I] would talk about it, we would cry about it. He’d say, ‘I’m nervous about this,’ and I’d say, ‘all we can do is take the next step. But we’re going to have a positive outlook because that’s the only thing that daddy needs right now,’” Lizzy says. “Then I’d say to Rich, ‘This sucks, but we’re here and there’s only one way out and we might as well be positive. You have two choices: you can recover fully or you can fully recover.’ Obviously, I’ll accept if he gets to eighty percent. Even if he doesn’t recover any further, we will still lead a happy life. But we’re going to keep trying.”

And they will continue sharing their experience, as it has given the stroke community a lot of hope, and established a mutual comfort knowing they aren’t alone.

“One of the incredible things is he has shown so much progress,” says Lzzy. “His prognosis was so grim. For all intents and purposes, his recovery is nothing short of miraculous. He has worked so hard. And I do think that part of the reason he has recovered so well is because –”

“Of these people,” Rich interjects, gesturing to Lizzy and Little Rich. “I had to do it for them”

It was always all for the “we.”

To keep up with the McMahons, follow them on TikTok here and Instagram here.