In our last post on How to tell if someone is having a stroke, we discussed signs and symptoms of identifying a stroke with very high accuracy. Today’s post is about what exactly is a stroke?
A stroke, otherwise known as a cerebrovascular accident (CVA), is when your brain suffers an injury or death of brain tissue because of the lack of blood to your brain cells. This can be caused by either lack of oxygen (blockage) or bleeding (hemorrhage).
Getting proper stroke care for someone is extremely time critical. There is a 3 hour window that hospitals go by in order to see if someone qualifies for certain treatments. These treatments wipe out blockages and help the stroke victim to have a chance to recover from whatever damage the stroke has caused.
If you get help outside of the 3 hour window, this treatment is not available to you. Of course, a hospital will still care for your symptoms and you will be able to get rehab, but it will be much more difficult to recover from the devastating symptoms of stroke.
One thing to note is hospitals will give you a CT scan to make sure that you are not having a bleed instead of a blockage. If you are having a bleed, you will not be eligible for the “stroke blocker” as this would probably be fatal. The reason is the “TPA”-the procedure used to unblock the stroke, thins out your blood, thereby unblocking the blood flow. If you are already bleeding, this treatment would make your bleeding much worse.
So, please read my last post on how to identify a stroke and if someone is having these symptoms, call 911 immediately. You may very well be increasing you or a loved one’s quality of life.
[...] 29, 2008 by andiethomas The last couple of posts we talked about what is a stroke and what to do if you have one. Those are very important things to know, but most importantly, [...]