Stroke, revisitied
Three years ago, while we were on our annual family beach trip, my husband suffered a stroke. He’s fine now, but as a public service on the anniversary week of that pivotal day, I’m reposting.
Here’s the original story, which ran in the News & Observer, in August, 2016.
The young family across the street from us gathered on the tiny front porch, then walked hand-in-hand — all eight of them — across the street to our driveway. My husband, who stood on the deck, walked down the steps to greet them. They were strangers to us, but two days before, the six children and their mother had gathered on the porch, witnesses to our family crisis.
“When you had your heart attack,” the father said, shaking my husband’s hand, “I was at the store. My wife called saying y’all were looking for aspirin, but I couldn’t get here in time, so I told her to take the kids inside and start praying.”
Which they did that morning and every night at supper after that. They didn’t even know my husband’s name.
Truth is that on that Tuesday morning in the middle of our vacation, my husband had a stroke. And a seizure. He is alive and well today to tell the story, though he doesn’t remember it. Doesn’t remember how we found him unresponsive on the deck of our family beach house — lips blue, face ghostly, body rigid — doesn’t remember my screaming, our daughter flagging help in the street, our son-in-law running toward where my sister stood three houses away, yelling for her to call 911.
The children witnessed my extended family running toward us, saw my husband wake up, thank God, flailing his arms at everyone around him, looking to take a punch. Which is so not him. What they didn’t see, thank God, too, were the blacks of his eyes — unseeing as we all gathered around him, tried to calm him, waited on EMTs.
We would spend two days in New Hanover Regional Hospital as doctors tried to figure out what happened. Records show that he presented in the ER with an “altered mental state.” An MRI confirmed the stroke.
That he has no residual effects from any of it is nothing short of a miracle.
In times of crisis, look for the helpers, Mr. Rogers always said, and after the ambulance arrived, I moved away from my husband’s side, knowing I was not one of them. Around me my nephews poured cool water over his body. A doctor who happened to be driving by tried to calm him. A male nurse on vacation rubbed his shoulders. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. “Care for him,” I prayed, for there was no better thing I could do.
“Your husband exhibited the classic signs of a heat stroke,” says Dr. Robert Park, a partner with Wake Emergency Physicians, PA., a private practice which supplies emergency room staff to all seven Wake Med emergency rooms, in addition to several other hospitals in the area. “When I hear he is agitated, all limbs working well, a change in mental status, that tells me it’s a heat stroke.
Heat stroke. A rare occurrence that can be fatal, but something entirely preventable. The curious thing is that he also had a cerebrovascular accident (CVA), the medical term for stroke. (So heat stroke was actually off the table.)
I sometimes call my husband The Skipper. He’s on his seventh sailboat now, Fortune’s Fool V and most weekends in the past year have found him on the deck of the boat piddling with his love.
On July 8, the heat index reached 104 in New Bern, where our boat is docked. And the Skipper forgot to hydrate well. (Forgot to tell me he was even going to the boat before heading to the beach.) The next day he developed a headache, and on the morning of July 12, he drove to the grocery store and purchased an over-the-counter sinus headache medication called Sine-Off. Within 30 minutes, the house shook like it would during a sonic boom and unbeknownst to us, he was down on the deck, closer to signing off from this life than I can even think about.
He had all the signs of dehydration, says Dr. Park: headache, thirst, elevated body temperature. The headache, though, was his only complaint. As far as we know, he showed no signs of stroke: slurred speech, numbness on one side of the body, drooping face.
There is a grave difference between heat stroke and heat exhaustion, says Dr. Park, and heat stroke is much worse. Every summer, as temperatures hover near 100 degrees, he sees many cases of heat exhaustion but fewer heat strokes.
“Athletes, construction workers, people who spend ours at a time in direct sunlight and don’t drink enough water start cramping up,” he says. “They get dizzy, have a headache, cold sweats, may even pass out. That’s heat exhaustion.”
Heat stroke, he says, involves changes in mental status, and other organs — like kidneys — can be affected. If untreated, it can cause death. It’s rare, Park says, for someone to have a heat stroke and a CVA at the same time.
There are so many miracles in what happened — minutes later, and we’d have been gone from the house and he would have been on his morning walk. Seconds later, he would have fallen down the stairs. And so many lessons. We’ve learned about the app on our phones where we can store our medical history. We’re reminded that we have subscribed to a service that keeps our medical power of attorney and HIPPA permissions at hand for doctors to access easily should either of us be incapacitated. (In the midst of the trauma I had forgotten about the card I keep in my wallet.)
Our children have learned that we are not going to be here forever. A scary but important lesson to learn.
We are still seeking answers, and while we wait for appointments, The Skipper has found a new appreciation for water. And honestly, I have a new appreciation for the Skipper. I’m grateful for the helpers and for children who spend a hot summer morning praying for a man they didn’t know.
+++
In the months after the stroke, my husband went through a series of tests at home that determined he did indeed have a blood clot that broke away and made its way to his brain. Regardless of the cause, which was a minute hole in his heart, strokes and heat strokes are life-threatening conditions, and emergency care should be sought immediately.
