Stroke is the 5th leading cause of death in the US, with one person dying every 4 minutes as a result. For black people, stroke is the 3rd leading cause of death.
Approximately 800,000 people have a stroke each year; about one every 40 seconds. Only heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, and accidents are more deadly.1-3
Strokes occur due to problems with the blood supply to the brain: either the blood supply is blocked or a blood vessel within the brain ruptures, causing brain tissue to die. A stroke is a medical emergency, and treatment must be sought as quickly as possible.
There are two main kinds of stroke Ischemic strokes and Hemorrhagic strokes. There are others as TIA’s referred Transient Ischemic Attack and Congenital Vascular Malformation (CVM) is a tangle of abnormal blood vessels connecting arteries and veins in the brain. CVM’s are rare and affect less than 1 percent of the population.
On October 26th, 2015, my wife and I sat down to watch our favorite show, “Blindspot,” at 10:00 pm. It had been a pretty regular day, I had just got up from doing a little work on my laptop, I am a Physical Therapist by trade. In the next 30 minutes, my life would change drastically. Over the years, I have been exposed to the worst medical trauma that life can send your way and one of my worst fears was happening, as a blood clot had dislodged from my heart, rapidly running up to my brain. It happened so fast that the last thing I remembered, (several months later) was the loss of vision in my right eye. I had just had a Cerebrovascular incident, better known as a stroke. I was just 49 years old at the time.
The rest of the evening was told to me by my wife since she is also a therapist herself, she became concerned when I stopped talking to her while we were watching the show. She explained that when she got in front of me and saw that my gaze was fixed, I could not speak, and I was randomly moving my left arm above my head. She thought at first I had a seizure, maybe hoping so. But then she picked up my right arm, elevated it above my head and let it go. It immediately fell back down on the chair. She knew I was in big trouble and called 911.