Jessica Taranto treats her body "like a temple."
She works out every day and eats healthy. As a kidney transplant patient, she's always monitoring her vitals.
That didn't stop her from having a stroke about 18 months ago.
Taranto recovered quickly — she was home from the hospital within days and back to work within weeks.
She's now wrapping up her first full year back as a fourth grade teacher in Eaton Rapids, and the stroke didn't drastically affect her life.
The biggest struggle, she said, has been that she already felt like she was doing everything right.
She's aware the outcome could have been much worse.
Husband noticed something was wrong
As a kidney transplant patient, Taranto always has some kind of underlying health risk.
But nothing indicated a stroke was on that list of risks, she said.
Taranto was laying on her couch on Dec. 20, 2018 — her birthday — in pain from a root canal the day before when her husband started noticing something was off.
He told her he was going to call the hospital.
"I was actually arguing with him," she said.
He called for an ambulance anyway, and that's when Taranto's memory gets fuzzy.
She doesn't remember the ride to the hospital.
She can recall a doctor telling her she had a stroke and talking to her husband at the hospital.
Taranto also clearly remembers the procedure to remove the blood clot from the front right side of her brain, describing it as "scary and somewhat painful."
She started recovering almost immediately.
"By the time they got me up to the ICU in my room, all parts of my body were fully functioning again," Taranto said.
She was in the hospital for just two days before going home.
Taranto saw speech therapists and physical therapists and had follow-up appointments, but she said that was mostly a formality. They just needed to make sure the stroke hadn't had lasting impacts, and it didn't.
Doctors can't always find a cause
Taranto had an ischemic stroke, Dr. Anmar Razak said, which is the most common kind of stroke.
Razak, who head Sparrow's stroke center where Taranto was treated, said ischemic strokes are most common after age 65.
Taranto was in her early 40s when she had her stroke.
"You don’t expect someone as young and as healthy as Jessica to have a stroke," he said.
The most common risk factors are high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes and smoking, he said, though excessive alcohol use and a sedentary lifestyle also can contribute.
Medical professionals have started seeing more strokes in people younger than 50, Razak said, though it's more common in people with a sedentary lifestyle or who are obese, neither of which is the case for Taranto.
Doctors look for risk factors that might have been undiagnosed then for underlying factors, like injury to vessels in the neck or a clotting disorder, Razak said. If those tests don't turn up anything, they'll send people home with a device to monitor their heart rhythm, since an irregular heartbeat can cause clotting.
But for up to ⅓ of stroke patients, Razak said, doctors never find a cause for the stroke.
"Sometimes, things remain a mystery," he said.
'Take care of yourself'
Part of Taranto's biggest struggle after the stroke has been that she doesn't know what could have caused it.
"I felt like I was already doing everything that I was supposed to be doing," she said.
She works out a little longer now, and she and her husband honed their diet to include a bit more green.
She also does a lot more monitoring and takes all her medication when she's supposed to. Doctors prescribed her one medication after the stroke, she said, to keep her cholesterol down.
Because of her kidney disease, Taranto's cholesterol runs near the borderline, and they wanted to bring it down as a precaution.
Taranto took two weeks off because of stamina issues, even though she initially wanted to go right back to work.
Taranto and her husband ran at Walt Disney World just a couple months after her stroke.
One of the first questions they had for doctors was whether they could still go to runDisney.
Doctors wouldn't let her ride any roller coasters, but they gave her the green light to run.
Though her recovery was easy and she hasn't had to change much, her biggest takeaway "is to still take care of yourself" and to be aware of the signs of a stroke.
Be aware, call for help immediately
Taranto credits her husband's knowledge of the signs of a stroke and his quick action.
"If he had listened to me for once in his life, we might be having a different conversation," she joked.
She urged people to be aware of the signs and call for help immediately.
Getting help right away is absolutely key, Razak said.
The medicine doctors give someone to dissolve the clot that causes an ischemic stroke and improve blood flow has to be given within 4 ½ hours from the start of a stroke to be effective, he said.
In the case of a large vessel occlusion stroke like Taranto had, where there's a clot in one of the major arteries of the brain, there's also a surgical treatment.
That surgery, called a thrombectomy, gives people a higher likelihood of recovering with a good outcome, he said.
It can be done up to 24 hours later, Razak said, but every second counts when it comes to a stroke.
"You're kind of racing and rushing against time," he said. "More brain cells die every second you don't act."
In fact, 2 million brain cells die every minute doctors can't act, he said.
Important to know more than FAST
That's why it's important to know the signs of a stroke, he said.
There are the common ones in the FAST acronym — a drooping face, one arm drifting downward with hands raised, and slurred or strange speech. That acronym also urges people to get help immediately.
But a stroke can present other ways, Razak said, including sudden dizziness or vision loss.
He urged people to look for "anything that suddenly acutely changes the person you know to a person you don’t recognize" because something simply looks wrong or off.
People should also act immediately.
"Never wait for a stroke sign to pass," Razak said.
They also shouldn't drive themselves or their loved one, he said, but should always call 911.
Not every hospital has a comprehensive stroke center like Sparrow, he said, but emergency responders should know where to take someone for treatment.
Otherwise, the ambulance likely will end up having to spend time taking the patient to a hospital that can perform a thrombectomy or otherwise treat the stroke effectively, he said, and "time is brain."
Contact reporter Megan Banta at mbanta@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @MeganBanta_1.
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