According to brooklynvegan.com, Matthew Sweet has given an update on his condition following the stroke he suffered in Toronto while on tour.:“I’ve lived through the day where I realized I may never play guitar again, I’ve lived through the day where I realized I may never draw a straight line again or enjoy the past time that developed over just the last year of my life, painting with fountain pens and coloring with dip pens and ink,” Sweet writes on his GoFundMe.

The artist adds: “Thanking the many who have donated, raising over half a million dollars for his medical bills and rehabilitation. “I understand now what it means to need to reinvent oneself, when the self you knew before is gone, you have no other choice, you either quit or you keep going and so I feel I must keep going and I feel a great burden to do so with such incredible support that you, many of whom I do not know, have given me. It’s hard to start here without saying how touched and humbled I am by the success of my GoFundMe page.”

Sweet continues with:”My future would be gone without it. I stand a chance it is as simple as that,” he writes, adding later, “As I learned to walk, bathe, strengthen my legs, learn what hard work really was, I cried many times at my terrible fate and yet I also was so thankful for the fate I had in life, because it was a wonderful fate and I was so lucky and found everything I wanted again and again and again. Not too many people I suppose can say that. But you have taught me what care is.”

In the lengthy update, the musician recounts the stroke and the days that followed: “I just didn’t realize how much I’d lost as I waited ten days to be given clearance from the doctors at Toronto Western Hospital, where I lay in the stroke unit waiting to be released. ‘Do you know where you are? What is the date? What is the year? What is your name? Where are you?’ These are the things I was asked every day…The only way they would let me travel back to the states was with a medical crew, on an airplane and straight into a rehabilitation hospital. The cost of all these things was already astronomical. What is mankind doing? To not make these things available as part of our culture everywhere.”