Brain damage or back-to-normal? Seconds make a difference in stroke care

Margie "Kay" Pope 0:00
The right side of my face and started to drink from what they told me and I was still coherent and awake, but I couldn't form any words and I couldn't speak at all.

Gina DiPietro 0:10
That's 64-year-old Margie "Kay" Pope of Sunset Beach, North Carolina, describing the most terrifying experience of her life.

Margie "Kay" Pope 0:20
I'll never forget it - it was November 7, 2019.

Gina DiPietro 0:30
Welcome to Novant Health Healthy Headlines. I'm Gina DiPietro. In this episode, Kay explains how a funny feeling that November night sent she and her 65-year-old husband, Frank, to the emergency room in search of answers. More on that and how a cutting-edge software provided quick access to care when she needed it most. Now back to Kay.

Margie "Kay" Pope 0:56
It happened in the middle of the night. Fortunately, I was awake at the time I was having trouble sleeping. And that ended up being a good thing at that particular time because I realized all of a sudden my right arm was going numb. But it was a weird feeling numb wasn't your typical, you know, my hand is falling asleep. So I woke my husband up because I knew something was wrong. We contemplated for a little bit and you know, what do we do? So we made the decision to go to the emergency room. We're about 30 minutes from Brunswick, the Novant Health Hospital in Bolivia. So we drove there, got there about three o'clock in the morning. And they started running all the tests on me. They did a couple of CAT scans, they I think they did an EKG and some other things. And also they were in conference at the time with New Hanover Regional Medical Center. I found out later the stroke center there, they discovered that I had a clot that had moved in my brain.

Gina DiPietro 1:55
She didn't know at the time, but that blood clot caused Kay to have a stroke. She was airlifted by helicopter from Novant Health Brunswick Medical Center in Bolivia, North Carolina, to Wilmington's New Hanover Regional Medical Center, recently acquired by Novant Health.

Margie "Kay" Pope 2:10
When I got there, the stroke team was waiting for me wheeled me into a room did a procedure that I can't pronounce the name of and as soon as the clock was out, I was fine. All the symptoms were gone. Supposedly the procedure they did on me from what I was told they've got about a 4 to 6 hour window where they can do that. Otherwise it's too late. And I think that's kind of the point of what we're talking about is to acknowledge to people the faster you move on something like this, the better off the outcomes going to be. Because by the time I left the Novant hospital, airlifted to Wilmington, I could no longer speak. So the symptoms were gradually getting worse. It started with the numbness that I had no use of my right arm at all the right side of my face and started to droop for what they told me. And I was still coherent and awake. But I couldn't form any words, and I couldn't speak at all.

Gina DiPietro 3:07
Wow, that had to have been so scary.

Margie "Kay" Pope 3:09
Absolutely, the most terrifying thing I've ever had happen in my life.

Gina DiPietro 3:13
Was your husband with you the whole time? Was he able to fly in a helicopter?

Margie "Kay" Pope 3:17
No. And that was the bad part about that. He just saw me leaving the helicopter and didn't know what was going on.And then by the time he got there and they let him into saving the procedure was over and I was fine. And he was kind of in a state of shock because the last time he saw me, I couldn't speak, you know, and I had all these symptoms and the next time you saw me, I'm like Hi, I'm fine. So, he had a bit of an emotional turmoil to go along with it as well.

Gina DiPietro 3:48
You'll remember she arrived at the emergency room around 3am and by six or 6:30 that morning she was out of surgery. While the Pope's quick thinking to seek help certainly played a role. So did Viz.ai - a video based platform that provides remote access to a neurologist, the expert in stroke care. Here's some context. in a rural hospital setting, it often takes at least an hour to get results from some of the more critical scans. But with this AI the scan is uploaded instantaneously to a "cloud" to be read by artificial intelligence. If a stroke is detected, the emergency physician is alerted immediately as the patient is transferred to a facility that can provide stroke care. A team of medical professionals led by an interventional neurologist is already preparing to take that person into surgery. Here's Dr. Vinodh Doss, an interventional neurologist and medical director of stroke and interventional surgery at New Hanover Regional Medical Center who performed case surgery that scary night back in November.

Dr. Vinodh Doss 4:52
I'm awake. I'm at the hospital waiting for her to get there. We evaluate her it's clear that she still hasn't symptom should go straight to the angiography suite. And that's where we go to work. We got the artery open in a matter of minutes. And she obviously benefited from the care from beginning to the end.

Gina DiPietro 5:13
Since you've been using Viz.ai, have you noticed an improvement in outcomes for stroke patients?

Dr. Vinodh Doss 5:19
Oh, yeah. Using this technology, this is 21st century medicine. We know, if you come through our doors and Wilmington, you're gonna be triage and treated very quickly, we have some of the best treatment times in the country. But if you're just an hour, 45 minutes an hour away, that changes. And that shouldn't be the case using the technology. I think that's what it's been an eye opening experience with me just working with Brunswick on this, and how much providers have bought into it, and used it and leveraged it as in not just communicating, reducing unnecessary transfers, and encouraging the patients that really need to come to us and get treated.

Gina DiPietro 5:59
Let's get back to Kay's story. A big reason she's sharing her experience lies in the fact that she did not ignore her symptoms. Time is key if you're experiencing a stroke. That's because up to 2 million brain cells die every minute when oxygen and nutrients are cut off.

Margie "Kay" Pope 6:16
Fortunately, I didn't do my normal. Because I've always been a very healthy person have never really had anything like this happen to me. And I have a tendency to just say, oh, it'll go away, I'll be fine. Which is the worst thing I could have possibly have done. But fortunately, the way my body felt just told me there's something really wrong here. This is not going to go away on its own. But I sat up in bed, he got a wet washcloth, I was putting it on my forehead. And the other thing that was kind of strange is the symptoms were kind of coming and going, as I've described to people before it literally felt like a wave going through my body. And then after a few minutes, the symptoms went away. And I felt better. So we kept kind of hemming and hawing and saying, oh, everything's okay. Well, a nurse told me later, that was the clot moving. And the fact that like I said, I was kind of losing control of my right arm. just said, okay, common sense is going to kick in here. And it may be nothing, but I need to go find out what's going on. And I'm very glad I did. Because had I not done that the outcome would not have been good like it is now.

Gina DiPietro 7:31
Do you have any lasting effects at all from what happened?

Margie "Kay" Pope 7:35
Not from the stroke. But ...