being stricken with a stroke was the furthest thing from nathan pryor’s mind as he worked out at his halifax gym four years ago. he was fit, ate a healthy diet, didn’t smoke, had no family history — and he was just 38 years old.
“it was kind of a shock to the doctors. they had no idea why i was there, given the state of my health at the time,” says pryor, referring to the emergency department of his local hospital. he had been in the middle of one of his six times weekly cross-fit sessions when he reached down to pick up his water bottle and knocked it over. the third time it happened he thought, “what the hell is going on?”
he says everything became foggy and he felt paralysis creeping into the left side of his body. luckily one of the gym’s staff was training to be a paramedic and tended to him while someone else called 911. in a blur, he was on a stretcher in an ambulance and on his way to the hospital, which was five minutes away, where a team of doctors was waiting for him.
“they did a ct scan and identified a rather sizeable clot on the right side of my brain and administered the clot busting drug [alteplase],” he recalls. “but that didn’t get the job done, so i was pushed into surgery pretty quickly.”
doctors used a treatment called endovascular thrombectomy (evt), in which a retrievable stent was threaded up through pryor’s blood vessels, latched onto the clot, and pulled it out. the procedure can be used for a select group of patients up to 24 hours after symptoms first appear, an increase from the previous window of 12 hours. doctors, however, stress that the sooner the stroke is treated the better. according to the
heart & stroke foundation of canada
, 1.9 million brain cells die every minute during a stroke, which is why emergency treatment is critical.
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