As every year, World Stroke Organization, an NGO based in Geneva, Switzerland, is organizing this Saturday, October 29 a global campaign to fight against strokes. In France, 150,000 people are victims of a stroke every year, 30,000 die from it, according to figures from the Ministry of Health
. Many also get away with minimal sequelae if the stroke is taken care of in time. Dany, a Mayenne who lives in Sainte-Gemmes-le-Robert, is one of these patients. This father was 27 when he suffered a stroke.
Dany, 27, was “completely prisoner of his body”
There were no warning signs, nothing to suggest a stroke. Dany had a stroke on the morning of Friday, December 1, 2017, while bottle-feeding his baby. “The limbs weren’t going where I wanted them to go, the arms, the legs weren’t working anymore. And then, when I wanted to call my wife for help, I realized that I couldn’t talk anymore. I could no longer articulate, speak properly“, recounts the father of the family, who is now 32 years old.
We are aware and we realize that the brain no longer makes the body work properly.
Dany
Dany can no longer speak, no words come out of her mouth. He only manages to say three letters “AVC” to his wife Maïté. “An hour before, we were talking normally. Everything was fine“, says Maïté. “At first I thought he was kidding me.“, she adds. The young mother understands what is happening when she sees that Dany’s mouth “was starting to fall sideways“. The main symptoms of stroke
are gathered : mouth distortion, speech disturbances, arms or legs that no longer respond.
Dany’s wife quickly calls the firefighters, who arrive “after fifteen or minutes”. “It seemed like an eternity to me. It seems very long when we have the children to manage, when our spouse is on the sofa and can no longer do anything, completely prisoner of his body”, recalls Maïté.
An autoimmune disease that causes stroke
Dany was hospitalized first in Château-Gontier-sur-Mayenne, then in Angers. He remains four days in intensive care and resumes his work as a municipal employee about six months later. The sequels that he keeps don’t”don’t see each other“: moments of fatigue and memory problems. “You tell me your name, your first name today, in two hours, I am unable to give them to you. Memory is short. It was a weak point before, but it got worse after the stroke.“, explains Danny.
For me, it was reserved for people over 50! But no, it happened to us.
Maïté, Dany’s wife
Doctors take time to understand why this young Mayenne had a stroke. He doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t engage in risky behavior. The explanations of neurologists finally came out a year and a half ago: Dany actually suffers from an autoimmune disease, APS, antiphospholipid syndrome. “My body makes too much vitamin K and this vitamin K causes my blood to clot. This caused a clot in a vein in the brain. This is a fairly rare case. known that three years later”, describes Danny.
Dany now has lifelong medication to prevent another stroke. The 32-year-old from Mayenne has a string of medical appointments to do blood tests in particular. Maïté, she fights to make known the symptoms of the AVC around her. “We were lucky that I was there and that I could make the call almost immediately, it allowed rapid thrombolysis and reduced sequelae.“, she explains. Stroke is indeed a race against time: the faster the patients are taken care of, the less the sequelae are important. If in doubt, contact 15.