My name is Darnell Sears and my husband is Bryan Sears, we’re from West Virginia.
It happened while he was at work. He was in his second meeting of the morning and they were finishing up the meeting and he started having problems with his vision. Things were a little blurry and some of the other guys noticed and started asking him question and then he grabbed his head and started slumping to one side. His right side got weak.
The company that he works for, they had their own fire department and their own small clinics, so they knew the stroke symptoms so they immediately started taking care of him and got him to the trauma center. He already had the TPA the clot Buster within 53 minutes onset of his symptoms.
When he woke up he didn’t know who anybody was, of course he couldn’t talk or anything for awhile but then the next day he started recognizing some people and started saying a few words. He doesn’t have any weakness in the right side, he has numbness and tingling but he has good range of motion. He’s blind in the left eye now because of it, they think that it hit the eye first and he has the aphasia and the apraxia.
They did speech therapy after two or three days, they did two days of physical therapy and occupational therapy just to make sure he was safe to go home, and that was all fine. The speech therapy they tried to continue outpatient, we had someone coming to the home for a few weeks and it wasn’t very good. She was only there 45 minutes and their requirement through like home, health, and stuff they have to come in and do a regular assessment with blood pressure and taking his temperature and all that, so then that takes off the time of the 45 minutes so then they have maybe a half hour to try to work with him.
They didn’t do no education as far as you know what I could expect or what you know, what I needed to do they just handed me discharge papers they handed me a prescription for outpatient speech therapy and home health and then sent us on our way.
Yeah make lists, ask questions of the doctors, ask them about the aphasia and how best to handle it, because there’s depression that comes with that. You know when he couldn’t get his words out and he knew what he wanted to say but he just couldn’t get them out, and at one point he didn’t realize, he in the beginning he didn’t realize he wasn’t saying things appropriately.
And then as time went he realized he realized he wasn’t saying things appropriately and you know the depression set in then and that’s when he didn’t want to go around anybody. So you kind of need to be, need to be prepared for that and don’t just jump to giving them an antidepressant because that is going to slow down the brain function, which is already slowed. It just takes time for the swelling to go down and for the healing to start and if you can keep it, sometimes
I mean that medication is necessary. I chose not to medicate him and I’m so glad that I didn’t because it didn’t last long and everybody’s different but eventually he got out of that and then when he started seeing a little bit of progress, then he wanted more and more and more and he just started working and working to try to get back to his normal self.