In July, Mr Bingham became one of the 27,428 Australians who had a stroke for the first time in 2020.

He was out in the garden on an ordinary day when he experienced the sudden interruption to the blood flowing to his brain.

"I had the whipper-snipper and all of a sudden it just came over me that I didn't feel 100 per cent. I stood up and felt very giddy," Mr Bingham said.

"I had a visual disturbance and couldn't see properly and that's when [my wife] said, 'You've had a stroke'."

Maree Bingham drove her husband to Wagga Base Hospital and waited in fear while medical staff assessed how bad the damage had been.

"It was terrifying. Because you don't know the outcome ... It turns your life upside down because you just don't know what lies ahead," Mrs Bingham said

"It's important to stress that ... when people talk about stroke they talk about the drooping of the mouth, paralysis down one side or whatever. And Gary didn't have any of those symptoms."

Mr Bingham, aged 65, remembers almost nothing from his first few days in Wagga Base.

"It felt strange, to be perfectly honest. I was aware of where I was, however everything felt more like a dream than anything else," he said.

And he said his mind went blank when he tried to recall how to complete some simple, routine tasks.

"To go to the bathroom or even to walk down the ward, I'd put a dressing gown on. And my greatest feat was putting the dressing gown on the right way," he said.

Mr Bingham spent one week in the stroke unit and another two weeks in the rehabilitation unit before he was released.

His recovery involves ongoing physiotherapy and occupational therapy with Wagga Base Hospital staff who visit him in his home.

He still has issues with his eyesight but is otherwise "going very well", and praised the hospital's team for their high standard of care.

Mr Bingham said he had to overcome a sudden "trouble putting things together", caused by a residual stroke syndrome called constructional apraxia

"If I go down to the shed and I want to, say, service one of the mowers down there, I had a problem. I knew I could do it. But I'd just stand there and look at it and not know what to do."

"Things you take for granted ... you have to learn to do again. But the best part about it is, with persistence ... in my case it has come back."

Wagga Base Hospital's stroke care coordinator Katherine Mohr said it was distressing for any patient who was aware of losing some of their cognition.

"But certainly there's ways around it. The brain's a very, very smart organ. And we make new pathways in a brain for patients to remember," Ms Mohr said.

Mr Bingham considers himself fortunate to have made a strong recovery from his stroke and is even back in the garden whipper-snippering once more.

Ms Mohr pointed to Stroke Foundation statistics which say a third of patients will make a recovery but have some disability, while another third will make a complete recovery with no symptoms. The remaining third are expected to die within the first 12 months of their stroke.

Ms Mohr joined Wagga Base in 2007 to help establish the stroke unit, which was opened the following year.

Wagga Base Hospital's stroke unit has this month become the first of its kind in Australia to be awarded a prestigious "Gold Angel Award" by the World Stroke Organisation.

Ms Mohr said the award was a wonderful recognition of the hard work by all of the medical and ancillary staff in the unit.

"The award is probably a result of having a really good team who work really well together ... who just combine to look after patients really well," she said.

"Some patients don't do well, but generally they do. And it's great to see them go home."

Ms Mohr said her work was very rewarding but there were "some really hard things" to face in the unit

"We've got a man here now who's got a terrible language problem and he lives alone," she said. "Because even though if he goes home he can probably manage, if he has an emergency he can't ... If he fell over, how's he going to get someone to help him?"

Martin Jude is Wagga's only neurologist and was instrumental in establishing the Base Hospital's stroke unit.

Associate Professor Jude spent years lobbying the state government to establish stroke units outside of Newcastle, Wollongong and Sydney and succeeded in having eight facilities built, including the one in Wagga.

He hopes the Gold Angel Award will counter what he says is a perception that rural stroke outcomes will not be as good as those in metropolitan areas.

"It's important validation that ... not only are we doing well, but to be recognised as the only centre to have achieved this is huge," he said.

"If you can recognise stroke symptoms and ring an ambulance and get to hospital as fast as possible, particularly in the Murrumbidgee, hopefully people can be confident they're getting, really, best quality care."