Meghan Markle’s father Thomas may need a year of therapy after stroke, Duchess’s half-sister says 

Thomas Markle may need a year of therapy to recover his speech after being struck down by a suspected stroke this week, his daughter Samantha said.

His family had been worried about his high blood pressure for some time before he fell ill, resulting in him losing even the ability to tell paramedics what was wrong with him. 

Mr Markle, 77, had to write down his symptoms on a piece of paper.

It comes a week before he had been due to fly to London for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations. 

Samantha, half-sister to the Duchess of Sussex, said Monday’s ordeal could have been ‘fatal’ but her father was on the mend in a California hospital.

She told GB News: ‘I don’t think he saw it coming but he’s doing better – he’s in good spirits. It’s going to take several… maybe six months, maybe a year, to get his speech back. He can work with a speech therapist and it’s good, the attack he had in the speech producing part of the brain wasn’t so big that he can’t recover.’

She added: ‘But you know when you’re almost 80 years old, there’s less plasticity and things are more difficult.

‘So he has the memory of the words and the associations, the stroke was on the right side of the brain, so the damage was on the left and he’s left handed.

‘But it also impaired his speech and his ability to swallow.’