Vim & Vigor - Summer 2013 - Parrish 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 - Parrish Medical Center

Vim & Vigor - Summer 2013 - Parrish Medical Center
Contents
Tasty Tips
Opening Thoughts
Community Calendar
What’s New?
Walk This Way
The Ultimate Back-to-School Checklist
Join the Movement
Stroke Stories
5 Steps to Better Bone Health
Gut Instinct
Morgan Freeman
Prostate Playbook
The Main Ingredient
Looking Ahead
Read Up
Pedal to the Mettle
Community Health
Foundation Focus
Ask the Expert

Vim & Vigor - Summer 2013 - Parrish Medical Center