{"id":16235,"date":"2020-10-14T16:11:56","date_gmt":"2020-10-14T16:11:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sc101.org\/?p=16235"},"modified":"2020-10-14T16:11:56","modified_gmt":"2020-10-14T16:11:56","slug":"surviving-my-stroke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sc101.org\/surviving-my-stroke\/","title":{"rendered":"Surviving My Stroke"},"content":{"rendered":"
At a young age, I had a stroke. I had just flown back home to South Florida after graduating as a medical assistant. As soon as I landed, I experienced a crisis and went to the hospital. At the hospital, I could feel a sensation in my chin coming and going. I immediately knew what was happening to me – a stroke.<\/p>\n
The last thing I remember is texting my mother in Jamaica I think I\u2019m having a stroke. Every time I was hospitalized for sickle cell complications, my mother would fly to see me. I was her \u201cmiracle child,\u201d born despite her not being able to have children. When I texted her, she immediately flew to South Florida to come see me.<\/p>\n
This time, my mother said she knew something wasn\u2019t right. When she got to the hospital, I was unresponsive. She needed to hold me up so I wouldn\u2019t choke on my vomit, and she said I felt like \u201cdead body weight.\u201d From then on, things got much worse. I had blood clots in my brain, went into septic shock, experienced a minor heart attack, got pneumonia…. Everything that could possibly go wrong did. Eventually, I was rushed to the ICU and put in a coma and life support to stop my complications from getting worse. The doctors told my mother that they wouldn\u2019t know how bad the damage from the stroke and all the complications to my body and my brain were until I came out of the coma.<\/p>\n