Not all people show the typical signs of a stroke
Blog by David Butler-Jones
The typical signs of stroke – face drooping, inability to raise both arms, slurred or jumbled speech – they’re quite common, but not all strokes are like that. I didn’t have any of these signs.
I was in my office on a conference call, when I noticed these bands of light in the left side of my vision. Being a physician, I went through all the different possible causes, such as: Well, am I having a retinal detachment? (That’s when the layer of light-sensitive tissue separates from the inside of your eyeball.) But no, I had it in both eyes, so it wasn’t that. Well, maybe I’m having some kind of a migraine aura. I’d had migraines before, but always with a sensory aura where the upper-left quadrant of my face sort of goes numb before I get a headache. Maybe I’m just having a visual aura for the first time. But I also noticed the whole left side of my face was numb, and I thought, Maybe that’s just part of a different kind of migraine.
I was exhausted, so I went home and lay down on the couch. I got up for dinner and I had some difficulty swallowing, but other than that, I just thought, Hmm. That’s kind of funny. I was 58, and even with my family history – my dad had his first stroke at age 52, and his dad died at 49 of a heart attack – stroke and cardiovascular disease weren’t top of mind for me because I have other immune problems, as well as asthma, so I’d always thought it was my lungs that would do me in.
