Vim & Vigor - Summer 2013 - Gwinnett Medical Center - (Page 19)
OPENING PHOTO BY THINKSTOCK
The Comedian
John Kawie was 47. He had
just gotten married, and his
stand-up comedy was getting
noticed. A TV commercial
here and Comedy Central
spot there—things were falling into place. He and his
new wife, Marilyn Manno,
were kicking off their
honeymoon by attending
a friend’s out-of-town wedding. “The next morning, I get
up and I have this headache,”
Kawie says. “It was like a truck ran over
my brain, and the left side of my face was numb.”
Things got worse when they met friends for breakfast. “I don’t know what I was speaking, but it wasn’t
English. It was like a combination of Arabic and
Vulcan,” Kawie quips.
Kawie was having a stroke. The reason? A dissected carotid artery. One of the arteries responsible
for carrying blood to the brain from the heart had
torn, resulting in a buildup of blood and a clot that
blocked the blood flow. “It’s like having a heart attack,
but it’s your brain,” says Kawie, adding that he had
none of the traditional stroke risk factors. “I’ve never
been overweight, never had high blood pressure. The
doctors were scratching their heads, too.”
Early in his recovery, Kawie learned that the lasting effects of a stroke were more than physical. They
were mental, too. “I realized I couldn’t isolate myself,”
he says. “When you isolate yourself, it’s like a flower
with no sun—you wither away.” So Kawie became a
regular at a coffee shop near his apartment, bringing his notebooks with him so he could jot down his
thoughts and new jokes for his group therapy sessions. “Although I hated going to group therapy, they
allowed me to tell a joke before each meeting. I would
work on it all week. It turned my head around about
the stroke. Now anything negative that happened to
me because of the stroke became fodder.”
Kawie has taken his ability to joke about his stroke
even further. He has released a DVD of his one-man
show called Brain Freeze, in which he shares the
humor he was able to find on the road to recovery.
“I walk with a limp and my left arm is curled, but I’m
blessed,” he says.
* REMEMBER: A dissected carotid arteryorcan
happen spontaneously, for no medical reason,
as
a result of trauma, such as a sudden injury to the
neck (e.g., whiplash). “Many times people think the
slurred speech and dizziness could be a concussion,”
Matarese says. “We have to remember that this sudden neurological deficit could be an artery dissecting.” There are a number of different tests a doctor
can use to determine whether you’ve had a stroke,
including MRI and a CT scan.
The Teenager
Bailey Carlson had never seen her dad cry—until she
had a stroke at age 16. She was in theater class when
she got dizzy and the right side of her body went numb.
She couldn’t stand up. “I don’t remember the next two
weeks of my life,” she says. “They thought it was stress
or drugs. It was finally diagnosed as a stroke.”
Because of the damage caused, Carlson had to
undergo speech, physical and occupational therapy.
She also had aphasia. “Basically I was saying the
wrong word but thinking I was saying the right thing.
One time I asked my mom to hand me my cellphone,
but I said, ‘Can you hand me my fi nger pills?’ ”
Therapy helped her regain her language skills—
she’s actually a faster reader now than before—but
she wishes she had taken things more seriously. “I
didn’t do my exercises and treated it as nothing had
happened,” she says. “Now I still
have a hitch in my step, and my
hand is still tight. It’s better to
have two years of wearing leg and
arm braces than to spend your
whole life walking with a hitch
and having people stare at you.”
Still, Carlson has come a long
way. Ten days after she got out
of the hospital, she went back
to school. She now attends
college, where she is majoring in chemistry in hopes of
shaping the future of (what
else?) stroke medication.
Carlson also serves as a
Faces of Stroke ambassador for the National
Stroke Association.
SUMM ER 2013
19
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Vim & Vigor - Summer 2013 - Gwinnett Medical Center
Vim & Vigor - Summer 2013 - Gwinnett Medical Center
Contents
Phil’s Feature
ACL Double Take
Saving the Littlest Lives
The Ultimate Backto- School Checklist
Join the Movement
Stroke Stories
5 Steps to Better Bone Health
Gut Instinct
Morgan Freeman
Prostate Playbook
The Main Ingredient
Looking Ahead
Virtual Health
PrimeTime Health
Delivered from Devastation
A Big Reason to Smile
Out of the White Coat
Transforming Healthcare
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