Please excuse a serious post

This blog post will also appear shortly on the Dana Press blog. But it's important enough that I want to post it here, too.

This morning I received an e-mail from my parents with news about a family friend:

… she awoke and could not talk. Everything else was ok, so [the person with her] did not insist that she go to the hospital immediately. However, later in the day he called the hospital and they said she should get to the emergency room right away.

She had had a stroke, and the hospital did operate on her carotid artery.

Here’s how I replied to my parents:

How upsetting, and not just because [our friend] is such a dear person …. Please assure me that if you ever have any signs of a stroke—not just a blatant sign, such as not being able to speak—you will go to the hospital or call 911 right away. Do so even if your symptoms seem to pass; that could be what's called a transient ischemic attack, which is a tornado siren: the storm might miss you, but you go to the basement anyway.

Any one sign of a stroke means you assume that nothing else is OK, even if everything else seems OK.

There is a stroke treatment that is extremely effective in ischemic stroke (80 percent of strokes are ischemic) when administered within 3 hours of the start of symptoms. (It's a "clot buster" called tissue plasmonigen activator, or tPA, if you want to look it up.) One of the sadder facts in neuroscience is that the vast majority of stroke patients take time to see if their symptoms will subside — and experience far greater impairment (if they're lucky and don't die) because of it.

Please feel free to lift this text and send it to your own parents and friends. Heck, clip it and stick it to your refrigerator. It may help someone survive. As for our friend, she is lucky to be in speech therapy three times a week. Doctors are not sure she’ll be able to return to her own home.

For more information on stroke, please see Dana's pages on ischemic stroke and hemorrhagic stroke, from The Dana Guide to Brain Health’s online Condition Center.