So I was then given a series of tests in the casualty Department by a very experienced doctor. Again, I was very lucky. The doctor told me that my blood pressure was 240 over 180 which is rather high and gave me a couple of magic pills to bring it down in a hurry and I was then taken to the medical ward and diagnosed of, as of having a stroke.

Can you remember who told you after the operation that you’d had a stroke?

Who told me?

Mm hmm.

My sister mentioned it. She said to me and she told me and after she said it to me, I said to myself ‘I’ll have to let, let it sink in for a while, you know. I’m not going to say, and then after a wee while when I, you know, I gave it a thought and I just accepted it and she was expecting some reaction from me because I remember her saying, ‘Oh, shes in denial, shes in denial’ but I wasn’t in denial at all. I just accepted it. Somehow or other I got the strength to accept it and that’s the way I’ve been ever since. But my husband didn’t say very much but hes not, hes well over 80 and he didn’t understand very well and my sister and my son didn’t want to tell him too much, you know, they didn’t want to say to him. So hes still not really understanding it properly I don’t think but they were, it was my sister that told me really and then there was some ladies came in afterwards and they were social workers or somebody, I don’t know, and they were asking me the queerest questions, you know, about, first of all, they would ask me who, what’s the prime minister’s name, what’s the Queen’s name and things like this, you know, probably thinking, ‘Is her mind alright?’ sort of thing.

When the stroke first happened, did you have any investigations at all and can you tell me about any of the investigations that you had?

Well, some of the things, as I say, when I first went to Casualty and this is like things that were reported to me by my wife, they did a lot, they did like a sensation map I think they called it, just to try and suss out where I had any kind of feeling and how much the stroke had taken away the feeling to my left side, so they used just, just pins basically, stabbing my body and pinch me and things just to see if I had any feeling at all down my left side. My wife said, said it was quite awful for her to watch, people pushing needles into my arm and the side of my leg and me just lying there quite happy to let it happen, didn’t feel a thing. I had no sensation at all to my left side.

So we went back to the hospital and I got kept in that night again. Right. They were going to run more tests, they still thought it was a migraine at that point but my pupils, I heard one of the doctors saying that my pupils were still a bit dilated and but not to worry about it but my husband was then saying, ‘Well, surely a migraine you wouldn’t have that’, but he had said theres different types of headaches, so, and they can be quite serious. I got kept in again that night and my husband went home to get some stuff and bring them back and when he was in the lift, hed read something about strokes. It was a really big thing on the wall telling you about strokes and what the side effects can be and everything and he read it and said to me that hed read this thing and it sounds like I’ve had a stroke. So he then went to the doctor and said, ‘I think shes had a stroke and the doctor had said ‘Shes too young for a stroke and my husband disagreed. He said, ‘I disagree with you, I’d like you to check her out for a stroke and he went, ‘Shes too young for a stroke. So he then went to another doctor and they basically said I was too young as well for a stroke. But I think he got through to the other doctor. He said, ‘Well put her in for a brain scan or CT scan, MRI. So this was on the Monday morning now that I got the MRI scan.

Can you describe how they used the Doppler scan on your neck? Some people might not know.

Oh no. Well, it was like it, it’s like a little microphone and they put it against here like that phew, phew, you know, it, its obviously picking, they’re measuring the blood flow through there and what you hear is phew, phew, phew, phew, phew, phew and of course that is transmitted to the monitor and you can see where the whole thing, it’s, I don’t know how when they actually a camera of sorts and then you can certainly feel, you can see it going through like that and she said to me, ‘Oh yes, that’s blocked that’s clearly blocked it’s not getting round. Well try in different positions like that’, and it’s there apparently here (pointing to neck) and she said, ‘Yes, that’s blocked and I’m told that you think, well if, I’m told if you if you can get it quickly, they can give some sort of a drug that will disperse it but I think in my case, it was totally blocked.

Now, one doctor came to look at me and he said, ‘Well’, he said, ‘Sometimes it isn’t a block in the, in the actual arteries. It’s sometimes theres a piece of the artery gets flakes off, not flakes off but it, it sort of comes off like a flap on the artery and, and it then comes across like that and blocks like a non return valve of some sort’ He said, he said, ‘It could be that’ he said. Because theres no reason why I’d had a block in, in there at all, he said, because it seems to me as, he said it could be the reason why it did that, it was a flap. But there again my own doctor said he said it may be the case but there again they had the eye later which suspects that probably theres something floating around in the actual system so I, we said OK, well, it might be a thought, I thought, maybe a thought but I don’t think it was the case. It was something blocked but what it does, although it’s blocked the blood has to go somewhere and it, apparently it finds other ways round to get the, into the brain, you know, it gets in the and, and that’s what happened. So that’s why you get a bit better but I know no more than that at all, that’s all I know.

You mentioned that you had a scan of your carotid artery. Could you describe to me what the scan was like?

You just like down and they put the, put the cream on your, on your neck and they, they rubbed this thing over and I could see the, the, the screen, the picture on the screen, they were moving it about and they were taking shots and recording of it and that was painless and the girl was quite informative. She told me everything what, what they were doing and, of course, they look at, the doc, the specialists look at these and decided that an operation was necessary to clear the artery out because of build up, of obstruction in there.

An angiogram is an injection of radio opaque dye that is put in your arm, travels through the bloodstream and they take x-rays and they can see where there is maybe a tear in an artery or venal wall. The last angiogram I had was April last year and I’m due to have another one in October because 20 years after my first sub-arachnoid I had a second sub-arachnoid, treated at a different hospital and treated in a very different way.

So with the angiogram, do you have to have any anaesthetic or do they give you a sedative or anything?

No nothing. They like you awake so it’s quite a weird sensation. As a nurse, I can watch the monitor and know exactly where they are. I can’t say I actually felt the catheters because arteries don’t have nerve endings for that but you can see it on the monitor and when they inject the dye, the radiologist will say, ‘It will feel warm behind your right eye, and he injects the dye and you see the dye going through and, yes, it does feel warm behind your right eye but, no, no anaesthetic, no sedative, could have done with a double Scotch at the time [laughter] but fairly painless.

How did you feel when they told you you’d had a stroke?

I was on the stretcher at that time, you know, when he told me, ‘You’ve got a stroke.

It is not very happy news, you know. I got a stroke and I still am, am the stroke person, you know. I could not move this hand Totally disable could not walk myself Some person have to look after me, you know. Otherwise that is the, that is the, the most dangerous thing happen with the human being. Stroke is the worst thing.

And how did you feel when you realised what had happened?

Well, you just accept it. It has affected your speech and your memory, everything’s affected by it and also your mobility. I mean, I drove a car, I, you know, I was a member of the, you know, all different associations. That all goes by the book, I mean, you lose all that, which is a pity.

When you heard the word stroke and that, told that’s what’s happened, what did you feel?

I was really shocked to be honest because the, it wasn’t even the doctor that told me, it was my dad. As I came out from the CT scanner there was no doctors there and I could see by my dad’s face. And I said, What’s wrong And he said, You’ve had a stroke

How did he know?

I don’t know.

Oh.

I presume the doctor must have been in the room when I was being scanned and he’s come out and told my dad I’d, I don’t know.

I think because we are a lot younger doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t want to know what’s going on. Instead of going to parents or partners they need to focus more on the, on the patient and tell them what’s going on rather than everybody else because if we don’t’ understand that makes it so much worse for us.