Thoughts on Strokes

Steve Cole ponders a health issue that should concern everyone.
    

While she came through it okay, my beloved wife Leanna suffered a stroke on Wednesday, 18 May. Through a combination of luck and prudence, she got the anti-stroke medication in time and checked out of the hospital 36 hours later with zero damage from the event. Her story may provide insights for everyone else, and if it saves one of your loved ones, it's worth my taking up your time here.
    

Stroke is a major killer, along with heart problems and cancer. Stroke is when a blood vessel inside the brain breaks or leaks or gets plugged up with some plaque or a clot or something. (Go read a real medical website; don't rely on me for information.) It can result in just about anything bad you can imagine: death, loss of speech, lost of motor functions, mental confusion, paralysis, etc. Damage is usually permanent and severe. Trust me, you don't want one of these.
    

Television shows tell us that strokes happen during times of severe emotional stress, like an argument with your parent or business partner. My wife's stroke happened while she was carrying a shopping bag from a store to her car. While some people have risk factors for stroke, millions of people with risk factors will die of something else while millions of people without risk factors will die of strokes. In my wife's case, it caused both arms to go numb, so she dropped her purse and shopping bag. Confused, she tried to gather up the broken glass in the shopping bag and get to her car. Still confused, she could not find her cell phone to call for help. Her speech was slurred but she managed to ask a lady walking by to call me, and the lady decided on her own to also call 911.
    

If there is any humor in this event, it was that the broken bottle of sugar-free, cherry, snow-cone syrup looked like massive bleeding. No, that's really not funny at all. Nothing was.
    

By dumb luck the stroke did not happen two minutes later when she would have been driving in rush hour traffic. By dumb luck I was only two miles away. By dumb luck somebody called 911. Despite confusion, she said from the first that she wanted to go to a hospital. By dumb luck the emergency room was almost empty of other patients and she got immediate attention by several doctors who quickly realized what had happened. (I was thinking low blood sugar or a heart attack, but I'm an engineer, not a doctor.)
    

We then were told about tPA, an anti-stroke medicine that dissolves every blood clot in the whole body, reversing the effects of the kind of stroke she had. (The effects were coming and going in cycles a few minutes long, so it was obviously a blood clot type of stroke, not a brain bleed type of stroke.) The thing about tPA is that while it will reverse the effects of a blood clot stroke if taken in time, it will kill a random 5% of the patients who take it. (These patients have undetected blood clots preventing bleeding-into-the-brain strokes. Dissolve them and you die.) Faced with a high probability of permanent damage that would keep her from driving or cooking or being alone or talking or a 5% chance of death, she took the drugs. They had both of us sign off on it because she could be legally described as confused.

tPA must be started within three hours of the stroke or the odds of death go much higher very quickly. It takes half an hour to prepare, and an hour to feed it into your blood stream. Someone whispered in my ear where she could not hear: "Hold her hand. If this goes wrong your love will be the last thing she knows." The doctors said if it's going to kill her, that would happen within an hour after the medicine starts, and that was the scariest hour of our lives. Then she had to go to intensive care for 24 hours because even a bruise or a cut could be fatal. Once we got to intensive care, she was mostly just bored, but 36 hours later she walked out of the hospital with no ill effects other than two bad nights of sleep.
    

Any medical event presents the question: "Is this bad enough to go to the doctor and will I feel foolish spending a ton of money over-reacting?" Stroke is nothing to fool around with, and time is a ticking bomb. We were told endless stories of people who waited too long or were found too late and died or suffered major permanent damage. Learn how to recognize a stroke; slurred speech is a dead giveaway. You are (probably) not a doctor, so let a real doctor decide -- as soon as possible -- if this is a stroke or just a fainting spell.