Stroke Survivor of the Month - July 2003

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David Demm
Croton-on-Hudson, NY

It got really high during my son’s wedding and I lost control of my left side. The day after the wedding we all stayed in a hotel out in Long Island. The following morning when I woke up it felt like my left leg had grown about an inch longer than my right leg because going across saddles between rooms my foot would hit the saddle. I know that I had a glass of water on the table and when I sat down my left arm knocked it down onto the floor but nobody was around to see that. That was really the only two main things. I moved the car from one spot to another spot to be closer to the front door. I then drove my son back to LaGuardia Airport.

Nobody had observed anything unusual. I did think at one point that something was wrong and perhaps it was a stroke but I looked in the mirror and without any facial paralysis I discarded that. My thought was if you had a stroke you’d definitely see it in your face. I couldn’t see it.

So we went to bed that night and I got up in the middle of the night. I had trouble walking. I crashed into a wall and couldn’t back off the wall. We went to the emergency room that night. As I remember being in the emergency room my arm was still strong enough to grab the doctor and he said my blood pressure was very excessive and he couldn’t do anything until that came down. They put a lot of medication in, IVs and so forth.

Nobody to this day has ever told me what it was but I assume it’s been a stroke. We didn’t have a family doctor. We were in a health program and I never used it and never went into a hospital. The only time I used it was when I saw the doctor for a back problem. The doctors never told my family that I’d had a stroke. They told my wife the next day or so that I was in bad shape because of the high blood pressure and it was very critical. But when I came out from under the medication, unfortunately the paralysis was in. The following day that I was in the hospital my left side was very weak and I had lost control. But they looked at my voice and my ability to swallow and facial exercises and said I was lucky that nothing happened there. And everything was OK as far as they saw.