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.
The EMS responded quickly, it was about 10:45 pm, the 911 operator kept my wife on the phone, keeping her calm and talking to her while they were in route to my home. There were two ambulances and a fire truck, about six responders came in through my door. At the time, I weighed about 230#s, so it took at least 5 of them to lift me out of my recliner chair onto the stretcher. They suggested the closest and best hospital for stroke victims, as timing was critical, if I had a blood clot type of stroke. She would meet us there. Only recently did I remember them putting me into the ambulance and the EMS guy assessing me and trying to get me to talk on the way, then all was black again.
My wife and son arrived at the ER about 15 minutes after the ambulance, the hospital had already initiated their stroke protocol. I had been to CT for a scan, the Neurologist was on site, the ER physician and nurses had me stabilized. The ER physician, got the approximate time that my wife believed that the stroke had occurred, since she could estimate the time at about 10:30pm, it was now about 11:40 pm. She was told that a large blood clot had gone up into my brain, via the Middle Cerebral Artery. I had no movement on my right side, a fixed gaze and no speech. There is only about a 3-4 hour window to use the clot-busting medicine called tPA, therefore the timing must be accurate. Even though time was on my side, there was still a 6% chance of complications with this drug. As a therapist, my wife knew how debilitated my life would be without this medicine. She figured the odds were on my side. They started the IV tPA about 11:55pm, it would last for about an hour.
My ER nurse told my wife, that if the medicine worked as he had seen it in the past, I might be able to start moving my extremities, within a very short period of time. He wasn’t kidding, after only about 10-15 minutes of the tPA getting in my system, I started to move my right leg, then my right arm. I turned and looked at this same nurse and tried to speak. They kept asking me my name, I tried to say Jim, but it was more of a guttural cry, from somewhere deep inside me. I was back.
Surrogate Writer, PMD
“So open now your mind, your heart, and your life. For it is only the open vessel and an open heart that can contain the infinity of GOD.” Corinthians
http://https://youtu.be/FdSIwvYIQRU
