Stroke Survivor of the Month
Debbie Brantley
Cold Spring, NY

Debbie Brantley says:

"While working in the Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City during the spring of 1997 I completed my Master's Degree at the College of New Rochelle ("CNR", New Rochelle, N.Y). I am a Clinical Nurse Specialist in Holistic Nursing. After finishing my masters degree in Holistic Nursing I decided to go back to Alabama, my childhood home, to see if in fact it was still "home to me." I took a job at the University of Alabama at Birmingham as the Clinical Care Coordinator for the Congestive Heart Failure Project. While this was not a job as a CNS in Holistic Nursing my former nurse manager hired me knowing that I would bring a holistic perspective to the job.

Nearly two years later on the last Sunday of March 1999 I remember late that evening showing my dad some dresses that I had bought earlier in the day. When all of the sudden I felt extremely dizzy, like I was being 'pulled' to the left. Also, I had a sense of overwhelming nausea. I began to vomit and my dad had to help me to my 'old room'. My mother, also, a nurse, got up to go work the night shift. After, seeing my 'state' she stayed home from work. She asked me if I wanted to go to the Emergency Room. I refused. The next day I couldn't 'take it anymore'. I asked my mother and sister take me to a local "doc in the box', a walk in office. They misdiagnosed me with an inner ear infection gave me a shot of a medication to help with the nausea and sent me home. I am told that after my visit to the doc in the box, I became more unable to move and speak. There were many phone calls to the doc in the box and the pharmacist who apparently were not concerned.

I am told that I quit breathing and turned blue. My sister woke my mother up to "revive me". And on March 30, 1999 I lay in the Neuro Intensive Care Unit (NICU) of a Montgomery, Alabama hospital comatose, bald with a external tube to help relieve the swelling, on the breathing machine after a surgery to help figure out what was going on in my brain. Apparently I had suffered from a hemorrhagic stroke (bleeding) due to a clump of malformed vessels that had ruptured. The neurosurgeon told my family that I would not live through the night.

My family and friends gathered preparing for my death as I received last rites. Even so more family and friends gathered around the globe in prayer and healing intention through the night and day that followed. That night I was found cowering in the corner of my NICU room. Imagine that not only was I no longer comatose but I had removed my drainage tube as well as my breathing tube. I managed to remove the restraints and go over the side rail of my hospital bed.