As I sat with Dana, waiting to be seen, my brain was playing a slideshow of my life—old, happy memories cycled through my mind. It was like I was watching myself from above. (I was so out of it.) At the same time, I was really worried about my face looking different—I didn’t have any drooping, but my mouth was completely numb. I thought maybe I’d had a seizure from having a really high fever and started to worry I might die. Stroke was not on my mind at all.
I had an EKG and did X-rays and a bunch of blood work. The nurses told me I needed to get an MRI of my head and neck, but I had to wait until the machine was available. I was given anti-anxiety medications to help me relax, since I was pretty freaked out at this point, and told Dana she could leave since it was the middle of the night. A little later, I got the MRI—the only thing I remember is being asked if I wanted to listen to music during the procedure (I requested Taylor Swift)—and after, I was taken to my own room.
While all this was happening, I still felt so sick—I had a bad fever and the chills. My headache was also getting worse. I hadn’t regained feeling in the right side of my body, but it was slightly improving. My face was still numb and I couldn’t use my hand but, by leaning on the wall, I could put pressure on my right leg and walk to the bathroom.
After I woke up from napping for a few hours, I got super upset—I’d started to come to and realize what happened. It also concerned me that I had been at the ER for so long, and no one had told me anything about what was wrong. I called my friend Ashley, who lives in New York City, and told her what I experienced. I got really emotional, and felt so scared and alone. She hopped in her car and started driving up to Providence to be with me.
Around 10 a.m. a new doctor came in. I called my mom to listen in because I knew I wouldn’t be able to remember everything. He reviewed my test results and said he consulted with the overnight doctors, who wanted to send me home. To them, all of my test results appeared relatively normal. They didn’t know what happened, and since I was so young, they thought I’d most likely had a panic attack. But this new doctor said something wasn’t adding up. He identified a small injury in the artery in my neck, along with a tiny abnormality in my brain in the MRI scans.
He asked if I’d recently experienced any head trauma. I told him was involved in a very minor car accident six months ago, and another one in 2018, when I was rear-ended in traffic. At the time, the nurse I was treated by believed I had whiplash and a mild concussion, but that, overall, I was okay. Based on the imaging results and the two car accidents, my doctor suspected I had a vertebral artery dissection (VAD) in the back of my neck—basically, an artery in the back of my neck had a tear—and that caused a blood clot that traveled to my brain and caused a stroke. VAD is one of the main causes of strokes in younger people—especially athletes who are more prone to injuring their head or neck. He gave me low-dose aspirin and told me to take that daily until a follow-up appointment with a neurologist in six weeks. That felt like a really long time to me, but it’s standard protocol for monitoring stroke survivors.