I Had a Stroke at 33

All the stories I know and heard of stroke victims in their 30's or 40's make me think and ask: is there really a way to prevent or predict a stroke?

Would the "controversial routine full body scan" help? Specially to people who have a parent being an early stroke victim?

These things are scary as hell...

Yes, we are in the US. Her situation was unique in many respects. She was on her father's health insurance plan (Blue Cross and Blue Shield) and also had secondary health insurance from being a student athlete at our university. (The first of the three strokes occurred during a meet! The other two occurred within a day after being transported to the hospital.) Everything would have cost well over $100,000 had she not had insurance, but thankfully all visits/procedures were completely paid for.

I'm unsure how much it would have cost (uninsured) had it been a more straightforward path toward treatment. However, I left many details out of the story. Doctors were unsure if the stroke was simply caused by a PFO; they thought she may have had a more serious heart defect. Thus, she was airlifted to a better hospital for a more thorough diagnosis and later ended up having robotically-assisted heart surgery (i.e., not the simple, cheaper PFO closure procedure described in this article).

Another thing: her father was very persistent with the insurance companies throughout this entire ordeal. Had he not paid attention to the way things were being billed (i.e., between primary and secondary insurance), some costs may have been pushed onto her family.

Her memory experience was already reminding me of Leonard in Memento and then she writes, "it's time for my shot." That hit me unreasonably hard.

Is health insurance not an option?

Four weeks ago my girlfriend, 32 yo, had a brain stroke because a deep venous thrombosis at her left side of the head. It was intense to see how much she deteriorated in the course of just a few hours, starting with a seizure and some very acute headaches she had together with vomiting the previous days. We were in intensive care around 10 days, and then 3 days more in hospitalization. The investigation of her tendency to hypercoagulate yielded as main culprit sedentarism and the previous uninterrupted usage of oral contraceptives (mercilon) for almost ten years. We were fortunate in some sense as the cause was easy to point out and also as we discarded autoinmuse diaseases (my biggest concern) and now she is under low molecular weight heparin, hoping that the clot is reabsorbed in two or three months.

As part of the recovery, I'm reading to her My Stroke of Hindsight, of Jill Bolte Taylor, and her symptoms and the description of the episode of the acute phase match largely: speech loss, paralysys of her right part of the body and rational disconnect with external stimuli.

This article highlights also how sensible we are to the changes of what we are at the end: physicochemical interactions. I was worried my girlfriend would lose her essence, but thanks to God her recovery has been amazing so far.