Rhode Island stroke survivor relearns to speak practicing his Dunkin’ order

When Richard McMahon began relearning how to speak after two strokes, the words he practiced didn’t from a speech therapy textbook — they came from his Dunkin’ order.

Every day, sometimes hundreds of times, he repeated the familiar phrase — the same coffee order he’d recited countless mornings before October 2025, when a sudden stroke changed everything: large iced coffee, two creams, two sugars.

For his wife, Liz McMahon, the small routine became a powerful sign of recovery.

“It’s not just his Dunkin’ order, the rest of his language has significantly improved,” she said.

A stroke no one expected

Liz and Rich McMahon had built a life together that seemed predestined from the moment they met a decade ago at Novara’s, an Italian restaurant in Milton, where they both worked. He was the kitchen manager. She was the bar manager.

“I knew pretty much the minute I shook his hand,” Liz said. “I literally thought, This guy’s gonna ruin my life.” She added, “And he definitely was up to the challenge.”

The two married in their backyard in 2019, with their toddler son serving as best man.

Then, last October, everything changed.

Rich, then 53, had just launched a mobile detailing business. One morning, while working on a client’s car, he texted Liz with an unusual question.

“Can you Google what it means when you have, like, a light flashing in your eye?” she recalled him writing.

Moments earlier, he said, he’d felt a pop in his neck. Suddenly it looked “like somebody’s shining a flashlight on and off.”

Liz initially suspected an ocular migraine. Still, Rich drove himself to the Kent County Hospital’s emergency room in Warwick — “just to make sure I’m not having a stroke.”

Initially, emergency room doctors thought it was exactly that: an ocular migraine. But as Rich waited to be discharged, his symptoms worsened. His entire right side went numb.

Doctors rushed him back into the ER and discovered the cause: a carotid artery dissection, a tear in the artery wall that led to clotting and blocked blood flow to his brain. 

After receiving clot-busting medication, Rich was transferred to Rhode Island Hospital for observation. Liz was told he had suffered a minor stroke with no damage to his brain and he likely stay overnight. 

A grim prognosis

Soon after his arrival at Rhode Island Hospital, a second clot broke, causing another stroke.

Emergency surgery removed the clot from his brain through a thrombectomy.

When Liz arrived at the hospital, she didn’t yet understand how serious the situation had become.

“I walked in and it was way more serious than I initially thought,” she said.

A neurologist warned her that Rich might never walk independently again and would likely never regain normal speech.

“I would not expect to ever be able to have a conversation with him like you and I are having,” Liz remembers the doctor saying.

Her reaction was immediate.

“No,” she told the doctor. “I don’t accept that.”

The first word

After several days in intensive care, Rich was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital in Newport. On an intake scale measuring measuring cognitive and physical function, he scored a three out of 100.

He couldn’t speak. His right side was largely immobile.

Then one afternoon, his son pointed to a whiteboard in the hospital room. Written across were three simple words: We love you.

“Daddy, can you read what the board says?” his son asked.

Rich sounded out a single word: “We.”

For the next few days it became a giddy repetition, ‘we, we, we,’” Liz said. “Eventually I was like, ‘Okay, we get it,’” she added, laughing.

But that one word marked the beginning.

Within days he began counting aloud. Soon after, his mobility started to improve.

“Nothing, nothing, nothing — and then it kind of exploded,” Liz said of his progress.

Dunkin’ as therapy

As Rich’s speech slowly returned, Liz serached for ways to make language practice feel natural.

Before the stroke, Rich rarely went a day without a stop at Dunkin’.

“Every single day he got a Dunkin,” Liz said. “It was just a huge part of his routine.”

So they turned it into speech therapy.

“Day one of practicing our Dunkin’ order until he becomes a spokesman,” Liz joked in a video on her TikTok page, Chaos to Comeback.

@chaostocomeback It’s called manifesting, look it up 😂#strokesurvivor #strokerecovery #strokespouse #aphasia ♬ Monkeyshine-JP – Lt FitzGibbons Men

She initially shared the clip in January as a personal record of his recovery. In the months since, the videos now show Rich repeating the order — sometimes stumbling, sometimes laughing — while slowly regaining clarity and confidence.

“It really is a measuring stick,” Liz said. “If you watch day one and you watch day 30, the progress is incredible.”

What surprised Liz most wasn’t just the viral attention — it was the kindness.

Speech therapists, stroke survivors, and caregivers from around the world began sharing their own stories.

“We have found the only super positive corner of the internet,” she said. “There’s not a single negative comment.”

Meanwhile, Rich — once described by his wife as someone who “never met a stranger” — is slowly returning to his old self.

Conversations can still take time. Once, Liz said, it took him nearly 40 minutes to explain that Drake Maye’s wife resembled a relative.

But Liz says they’ve learned to laugh.

“If we chose to be frustrated, we would be frustrated all of the time,” she said.

Instead, they keep practicing — one coffee order at a time.

Annie Jonas is a Community writer at Boston.com. She was previously a local editor at Patch and a freelancer at the Financial Times.