1st Day of My Stroke
I started work in the morning with a completely horrendous headache. My husband had told me earlier that I should rest at home.
Thank goodness, I did not, because I would have died then, as I would have been on my own at home that morning. The only reason I had for going into work was because I had an urgent client call.
It was August 22, 2017.
The stroke happened at 1.30pm. It was a massive stroke. On a Richter scale it would have corresponded to a 7.5 or an 8 earthquake. On a National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS), a 1 to 4 score is a mild stroke, 5 to 15 is a medium stroke, 15 to 20 is a moderate to severe stroke, and 21 to 42 is a severe stroke. The doctors afterwards said that I had a scoring of 23 on the NIHHS, so it was an enormous stroke.
I was sitting down at my desk as it happened. I felt myself falling to the ground. I was calm but I could not speak. Colleagues came up to me, concerned. Then the secretary knelt down, making adjustments to my head. I wanted an ambulance immediately. I lost consciousness. When I regained consciousness again, the ambulance and paramedics had just arrived. I was wheeled out of the office. I blacked out again.
The First 4 Hours After a Stroke Are Crucial...
When it comes to strokes, it is crucial that you should be seen by a doctor during the first four hours. I was taken to the nearest hospital. Although I wouldn’t call the overall experience a lucky one for me, my first “stroke of luck” was that the nearest hospital was Singapore General Hospital, one of the best hospitals for serious cases like mine – how lucky I was! I did not know it was a stroke, but thought it was something much milder.
The second stroke of luck was that the neurologist who performed the emergency thrombectomy (i.e. procedure to remove blood clot from artery) on me, had done an internship at a hospital in Hungary many years ago. He noticed in me that I had suffered from a dissection in my left middle cerebral artery (MCA). A dissection is when the inner tissue of the artery detaches and creates a blockage. It created a flap inside the left artery - the flap should not have been there. This cut off the blood supply to the brain, and caused a severe stroke. I was very healthy and had low cholesterol levels and low blood pressure.
I am half European and half Japanese, so that would fit into the picture. According to the neurologist, dissections occur very rarely to Asian patients, but are more frequent in the European population. He actually had learned and operated on dissections while on his internship in Hungary. The danger is that if you press the wrong side of the flap, you damage the artery even more as opposed to clearing the clot.
The doctor’s meteoric thinking and professionalism saved me from what would have been deep complications.