FAST: Let’s Stop Stroke (from Moodle)
Speech is lost. Vision is stripped. Walking becomes impossible. Picking up a pencil is no longer viable. You certainly can’t read the concerned “Get well” texts from your friends. Eating is a burdensome chore. Your mother says she loves you, and you wonder who that woman could possible be. It only takes hours, minutes, seconds. You feel like you’ve lost everything.
It has been particularly difficult in my life to watch my lively and talkative grandmother deteriorate due to her loss of speech. Her desire to stay active has been diminished as the frustration surrounding her inaptitude to speak has taken over the forefront of her existence. Everyone used to call her “Polly”, as she was more talkative than a parrot who had just learned a new phrase. Our phone calls have become completely one-sided, and her only contribution is “I love you, I love you, I love you”. Phrases seem to get lost when travelling from her Wernicke’s area (the brain’s word-generator) to her tongue. I know the words are in there, but I’ll be darned if I ever hear her speak a full sentence again. If there were a way to end that pain and frustration, I would give everything for a cure.
Stroke occurs when a blood vessel leading to the brain becomes clotted, and typically leads to a deficit in the brain region in which the blood supply was cut off for a period of time. Maybe you know someone who has been handed that card. Maybe that someone is you. Nevertheless, stroke affects nearly 800,000 Americans each year. The brain is our body’s most mysterious organ, and deficits due to loss of brain function on some level are relatively unexplainable. Our bodies are designed to bounce back from all sorts of trauma, but the brain is one of our least regenerative organs, meaning that stroke effects are often irreversible. Our brain does literally everything for our body, and because it is responsible for all tasks from breathing to scratching an itch to solving Calculus problems, it is very difficult to map due to its complexity and simultaneous demonstration of actions/reactions. Each second, our brain performs hundreds of thousands of tasks, and even the slightest of interruption to a single pathway can be outrageously devastating.
What if you could talk again? See again? What if you could suddenly remember the woman who raised you? Walk again? Smile again? Stroke rehabilitation research is a huge topic of interest in the medical field and there are great advancements being made. I am excited to share with each of you some medical advancements that have been aimed at reversing, or at least alleviating, the detriments caused by stroke.
But more importantly, what if you could prevent a stroke from occurring in the first place? There are a multitude of daily preventative techniques that can help to stop a stroke before it even has the chance to start. By living a healthy lifestyle and incorporating a few simple steps into your daily routine, you can increase your chances of living a stroke-free life.
Over the next few weeks, I look forward to educating you on strokes. From types of deficits, to innovative rehabilitation techniques, to preventative measures, together we will explore the topic of stroke in conjunction with the most mysterious organ in our body.
