Jon Sarkin and Hank Turgeon had battled all afternoon on the Cape Ann golf course, Massachusetts. The time was about 3pm, Thursday 20 October 1988, and the two friends had cut out of work early, Sarkin from his chiropractic office, Turgeon from his carpentry. A slight breeze rippled as Sarkin bent down, reached inside his golf bag and fished around for a tee. As he pulled out his hand, he experienced a hideous dizzying sensation, as if his brain had suddenly twisted.

A part of his head seemed to unhinge, to split apart and rush away. I'm 35 years old and I'm going to die, he said to himself.

"Is anything wrong?" Turgeon asked.

Sarkin hesitated, trying to get his bearings.

What could he say? That he felt as if his brain had just broken in half? Sarkin took a few deep breaths, teed up his ball and swung from his heels.

He felt queasy, and as he walked towards the fairway he tried not to move his head. What he did not know was that somewhere deep in his brain a single blood vessel had shifted ever so slightly and the movement, as minuscule as it was, had caused a cataclysmic response in one of his cranial nerves.

"Do you mind if we quit?" he said.

"Sure," Turgeon answered.

When Sarkin walked in the door, his wife, Kim, knew immediately something wasn't right. "What's wrong, Jon?" she asked, balancing their nine-month-old baby boy on her hip.

"I don't know what happened," he said. "I just know everything is different and it's not ever going to be the same."

Three days after experiencing the strange shudder inside his head, Sarkin began hearing a high-pitched screech. The sound grew shriller every day until, by the end of October, it was nearly deafening: "Like a thousand screaming baboons."

Each morning he prayed the excruciating noise would be gone; when it wasn't, he forced himself to soldier on. In the quiet of his chiropractic office in nearby Hamilton, as he wrote up his notes each afternoon, he would dim the lights, fold his arms on his desk and lay his head down in despair.

In November, he went to see his friend and doctor John Abramson, who gave him a thorough neurological exam. Everything came up normal.

Abramson didn't doubt Sarkin was suffering – that much was clear from his friend's haggard look and the way he held his body, as if in a constant cringe. He thought Sarkin probably had tinnitus, where the sound comes from inside the head.

By December, not only was the noise deafening, but every other sound was causing extreme discomfort, too. When Sarkin lay in bed in the morning, the crackling coming from the kitchen sounded less like eggs frying than gunfire.

In July 1989, Sarkin read an article about a tinnitus specialist in New York and immediately made an appointment. For two days, the specialist put him through a battery of examinations. At the end, he recommended Sarkin buy a white-noise generator.

"That's all you can suggest?" Sarkin said, trying to control his disappointment.

Pressed, the doctor offered one tantalising long shot. Perhaps Sarkin's problem wasn't with his ear, but his brain. If so, there was a neurosurgeon at Presbyterian University Hospital in Pittsburgh whom Sarkin might want to consider.

That same month, Jon and Kim flew to meet him. Peter Jannetta ran tests, scanned Sarkin's brain and read his medical records. "It's pretty obvious what's going on," he said. A blood vessel had shifted in Jon's brain and become swollen; now it was impinging on his acoustic nerve, causing painful distortions of sound. The operation was extremely delicate and the dangers were myriad – bleeding, seizures, stroke, even death. But Jannetta had done it hundreds of times and no one had even suffered a serious complication.

On 8 August, only a few weeks later, Jannetta fingered the bony knob just behind his patient's left ear and marked the shaved area with a large black X. Sarkin was on an operating table, his head secured in a surgical vice, his brain about to be exposed. Jannetta's quarry was a swollen blood vessel that could be anywhere along the length of the eighth cranial nerve. When he finally reached it, he could clearly see the source of Sarkin's painful condition. First, as he had predicted, a vein no more than 400ths of an inch thick was rubbing up against the auditory nerve. The second problem was more perilous: the anterior inferior cerebellar artery, one of a pair of blood vessels that provide oxygen to portions of the frontal and parietal lobes, was twisted across the auditory nerve. Jannetta cautiously lifted the artery and placed a piece of Teflon between vessel and nerve.

Later, in the recovery room, Kim stood by Jon's bed as he slowly woke. "Is the ringing gone?" she asked. He nodded slowly.

The following day, Sarkin dipped in and out of a drowsy half-sleep. His mother, Elaine, was sitting with him when, early in the afternoon, Kim walked in with the baby in her arms. Sarkin turned to his wife and child and opened his eyes.

Kim was taken aback. "Something's different," she said quietly to Elaine. She'd noticed it right away: a distant, glassy look in her husband's eyes.

"We need a doctor!" she called out.

A young resident at the nurse's station walked briskly in. As he began to peel the bandages from Sarkin's head, he paled. "There's a lot of blood," he said, to no one in particular. Then, without looking at them, he asked Kim and Elaine to step out.

Sarkin had suffered a massive stroke. Somewhere at the bottom of his brain, a blood vessel had burst, soaking the cerebellum in blood and causing it to swell. His brain was pressing so hard against his skull that blood had leaked through the surgical burr hole in the bone and breached the dam at the site of the wound.

After emergency surgery, Sarkin lingered for weeks in a semi-coma. There was considerable damage to his cerebellum and much of the left side of the brain had been removed. Jannetta had made no obvious mistake; Sarkin's stroke had been an "unforeseen consequence", an act of God.

When Sarkin was moved to the rehabilitation hospital in Woburn, Massachusetts, in November 1989, progress was slow and torturous. By far the most agonising chore was simply learning to sit. Trying to maintain his balance in a chair was like riding a waltzer at an amusement park – everything moved. The cerebellum controls many of the muscles used in fine-motor coordination, in legs, arms, fingers and faces. The impairment to these meant Sarkin's speech would always be slightly slurred, and he would always see double; instead of a seamless flow of information from the world, images stuttered through his brain like the frames of an old film when it tears and tumbles off its reel.

Kim tried to comfort her husband, but when she looked into his eyes, she didn't quite recognise him. He seemed only loosely tethered to the present, and to her. The man she'd married had been both fun and serious. He had jumped in with the band at their wedding reception and played a few rock solos, but he was so grounded, too, so dependable: never late with a bill, always putting money away. Now he seemed self-absorbed, uninterested in her or their son, and listless. He also seemed unable to hold anything back: if he didn't like what someone was wearing, he said so; if he thought someone was boring, he told them. Kim knew Jon's body was now vastly different, but no one had told her he might not think or act the same, that he might seem like a different man.

Sarkin returned home in December 1989. He quickly moved from a wheelchair to a walker, but it would take another six months to make the transition to a cane, and he would depend on it for the rest of his life. As the winter of 1990 turned to spring, Sarkin seemed stuck. Thinking things through – whether getting dressed or reading the newspaper – was almost impossible. Instead, his mind rambled, so nothing was ever finished: his hair was half-combed, conversations were left hanging. The most unsettling part for Sarkin was the sense that there were no filters, no chance for his brain to slow everything down and order the world into meaningful images and scenes. If he'd awakened from his stroke like an infant, having to learn the basics of life again, he was now like a teenager. There were occasional moments of exuberance, but mostly he was sullen and withdrawn. This was what exasperated Kim most – not his physical incapacities, but this mental and emotional fog. He existed in the family, but he wasn't part of it, not like normal husbands and fathers. At night Kim would think about the future. What if this was as much recovery as he'd ever be capable of, if this Jon, so distracted and often depressed, was the one she would have to live with for the rest of her life? The prospect was not something she was willing to face yet.

Sarkin began to write things down, fragments of thoughts, words that popped into his head. Occasionally he doodled, sometimes just circles or spirals or rows of zigzagging lines. Other times he drew cartoon faces assaulted by knives, or distorted hallucinogenic recollections of the deathly ill man lying in a hospital bed with tubes running in and out of his body. Gradually, he became more intent about his drawing; there was an urgency to it, as if he was filled with a need to get each image, each thought out of his head, so he often drew the same thing again and again. If he was at the dinner table and a picture popped into his head, he would get up in the middle of the conversation and find one of his drawing pads. Sometimes Kim would chastise him for being rude, and only then would he realise he'd done something wrong. Embarrassment, shame, guilt just didn't seem to register with him any more. He didn't mean to hurt or ignore Kim; the problem was that he was conscious only of the moment, able to discern only the "now" of his life.

In the spring of 1990, Sarkin resumed his practice, working two days a week, but no matter how many or how few patients he saw, he came home physically and psychologically exhausted. The hardest part was facing the fact that his interest had waned. He found himself taking longer and longer breaks between patients, and instead of reading charts, he would doodle on his letterhead paper. He and Kim had hoped the birth of their second child and the return to work would help his recovery, but the more they tried to act like a normal family, the more apparent it was that Jon was profoundly changed by the stroke in ways they hadn't wanted to believe. Often when he became despondent, he talked to Kim. The strength of their relationship was that not only did they love each other; they liked each other, too. They were each other's best friend. Even though Kim knew Jon couldn't completely understand her frustrations with him, she also knew he was willing to listen. The difference now, of course, was that she had to try harder to get his attention. He couldn't pick up on her moods, but if she told him she needed to talk, he'd sit and listen, and in their shared but separate miseries, a new, different kind of intimacy took hold.

In the summer of 1993, when the entire extended family was on holiday in Jamaica, Sarkin's sister, Jane, suggested he submit some of his doodles to the New Yorker. He got a call from the magazine a couple of months later – they wanted to buy eight of his illustrations. The fact that someone outside his family liked his art, and even paid him for it, helped him realise he couldn't continue forcing himself to go to work every day. In December, he decided to sell his practice. He felt relieved, but he also couldn't believe he was giving it all up. His purpose now was far less clear. Without the framework of his profession, he worried about being restless. Somewhere in his wounded brain, the secret to his new self resided, but he had no idea how, or even if, he would ever find it. "I feel like I'm a haunted house," he sometimes said to himself. "I feel at home, but never comfortable."

When the weather turned warm each year, Jon, Kim and their children often spent the day at one of the beaches along the North Shore. At the end of the summer of 1994, he found himself picking up a flat granite stone. Suddenly its glacial veins seemed to liquefy in his hand, the colours leaping up in an almost violent demand for attention. He found an old nail and began to scratch and scrape it across the stone, not thinking, just following this compulsion to draw. The stone made him feel alive with possibility. When he'd finished, a sense of satisfaction and calm washed over him. Then he threw the stone into the sea. The image wasn't the point. The process was what it was all about.

Drawing began to take over his life, and while Kim was unsure where it would lead, it offered Jon an outlet and a focus she hadn't seen since the stroke. Pictures poured from his fingers, spilling out of some deep, unconscious place. He was never without a backpack full of paper, pens and pencils. If his children were looking for attention, he'd hold them in his lap and continue to sketch with a savage intensity. But even as he immersed himself in his new life, he mourned his losses. He was moody and seemed to battle depression constantly. Kim knew what was going on. The day they'd both feared had arrived and they were having trouble admitting it to one another.

"I don't think I'm going to get any better than I am now," Jon said one day.

The realisation was difficult for both of them. Kim knew there would never be a miraculous return to the man she'd married, and letting go of that hope was the hardest part for her. For Jon, though, this was just the new order of things; there was little he could do except embrace it.

The experience with the New Yorker had encouraged him to send his sketches elsewhere and the New York Times Magazine and Boston Globe Magazine each bought a couple of his drawings in 1995 and 1996. A stasis seemed to settle over Jon and Kim, a kind of truce. No more expectations of Jon. For his part, he tried to involve himself more in his kids' lives. They held their marriage together through hope, faith, memory and their commitment to their children.

In April 2003, right before his 50th birthday, Sarkin was rewarded with his first New York art show. Kim and the children – Curtis, 15, Robin, 11, and Caroline, eight – and many of Sarkin's family and friends attended the opening, as did Meryl Streep, whose husband, Don Gummer, is a sculptor. It was a heady time.

Sarkin held court, dressed in a sports jacket, his favourite bolo tie and cowboy boots. At one point, a woman approached him. "Can I borrow you for a second?" she asked. "I just want to tell you what I think your art means." Sarkin politely obliged, and finally the woman asked him what he thought his art meant. "It doesn't mean anything," Sarkin said. "You want meaning? Go get the Wall Street Journal."

There was no intention to be rude or brusque. This was just how he was. He truly didn't think his art had any meaning. Whatever was in his mind, no matter how fragmentary or random, came out in his art. Reason was not a part of the process.

The night was a huge success. Sarkin earned about $20,000 in a little more than four hours. Jeweller David Yurman placed one of Sarkin's works in his Madison Avenue store window, and three other invitations for gallery shows were extended, two of them solo. A Manhattan money manager requested a painting for his office; a wealthy family wanted a portrait of their daughter.

Sometimes Sarkin said he felt as if it was one giant scam, that he was taking money merely for doing something he couldn't help but do. Over the next six years, his talent deepened, his art became more expansive and his success widened. Always, the urge to create consumed him.

Set loose from the constraints of normal reasoning, Sarkin's brain refocused on the random details of life, mixing memory and emotion, then distilling his experiences into words and images. His brain was a broken mirror, its pieces reflecting all the different parts: husband, child, father, artist, writer, obsessive. He had become, as one of his favourite poets, Wallace Stevens, once wrote, the sum of all "human shadows bright as glass". He would always have to create new stories, sift through more possibilities, line by line, colour by colour. The imperfect was now his paradise, and his art, like his life, lay in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

• This is an edited extract from Shadows Bright As Glass, by Amy Ellis Nutt, published next week by Piatkus Books at £13.99. To order a copy for £11.19 (including UK mainland p&p), call 0330 333 6846 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop.