A stroke is an injury to the brain that causes sudden neurologic impairment. Most strokes are ischemic stroke, where there's a blockage in a blood vessel reducing blood flow to a portion of the brain that causes damage if the blood flow is not restored in time. This all happened on Thanksgiving, and once it happened, I don't remember anything after that.
We called nine eleven, and the ambulance came to get him and we knew that he had had a stroke at that point.
Jim actually had two separate strokes within about a week of each other. The first stroke he came in with a left sided middle cerebral artery occlusion, which is an artery that supplies most of the frontal lobe and temporal lobe on the left side of his brain. We were able to identify the clot, do an emergency procedure called a cerebral angiogram, where we put the catheter up into the carotid artery and then further up identify the clot and then pull it out with aspiration device that sucks the clot out. He recovered very well from that procedure and then he also had a second stroke within a few days on the right side of his brain. A similar artery on the right side, we were able to retrieve that clot with aspiration and the follow-up MRI showed essentially no injury. And he's made an amazing recovery, you know from both of those interventions.
I feel as though he saved his life twice and what can you say about somebody that does that for you you know.
