Stroke patients limit recovery by waiting too long

Ah yes, blame the patient for YOUR fucking incompetency in not working with researchers to get   something better than tPA. It has been 22 years since we knew that it fails to completely resolve the stroke 88% of the time.
http://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/6074505-151/stroke-patients-limit-recovery-by-waiting-too-long
“I see a lot of patients who’ve had strokes, and they come back, and sometimes, they look like they’re lost. They’ve had an intensive inpatient recovery program, then they don’t know where to go after that,” Goins said. “They’re launched back in our community without a lot of guidance.”
Asa Pollard of Bend had a stroke at 39 on Jan. 1, 2016. He work up early in the morning thinking his arm was numb from sleeping on it funny. He rolled over and went back to sleep. When he woke again, he fell trying to get out of bed. He dragged himself to the bathroom, but realized something was definitely wrong. He called a friend but couldn’t form the words to say what had happened. His friend called an ambulance.
It wasn’t till much later, after a battery of tests, that doctors informed him it was a hemorrhagic stroke. A blood vessel had burst, leaking blood into his brain, paralyzing his right side and leaving him unable to speak.
“I’m a goal-setter,” Pollard says. “My first goal was to leave the hospital without a wheelchair.”
He stopped using the wheelchair 26 days after his stroke, two days before being discharged. While Pollard had undergone an intensive inpatient rehab program, including physical, occupational and speech therapy, once discharged, he felt there was little direction for how he could continue his rehab.
“I had to make my own way,” he said. “I had to get myself better.”
Pollard decided that anything he could do before the stroke, he would try again. That included rock climbing. He started going to the Bend Rock Gym, an indoor climbing facility. Wearing a helmet and wearing a harness clipped to a rope, he could practice pulling himself up by the holds without fear of falling.
Last February, he went skiing with Oregon Adaptive Sports. He had been an avid snowboarder, but decided to learn skiing for the additional challenge. When he walked out of the lodge and looked up at the mountain, he was overwhelmed by the beauty of the day and how far he had come.
“I just got tears in my eyes,” he recalls. “I stopped to breathe it all in.”
He’s gone kayaking and mountain biking, after having his bike altered to put all the brakes and shifters on the left side. He completed the Storm the Stairs race, a 2-mile course on the campus of Central Oregon Community College that includes more than 300 stairs, in less than 45 minutes. His goal for this summer is to run again.
Before the stroke, Pollard had planned to enroll at the University of Texas in Austin to complete a master’s degree in public health. With mounting medical bills, he decided to stay in Central Oregon, taking a few classes at Central Oregon Community College in the spring after his stroke, and eventually enrolling in a kinesiology program at Oregon State University-Cascades.
He credits the classwork for helping him regain his speech. He graduates this June.
“I want them to hand me a piece of paper as a stroke survivor,” he said. “And then everyone who comes after me as stroke survivors, I can say, if you take one class, two classes, I don’t care if it takes you 15 years, just keep going. Just keep doing it.”
His dream is to open a gym that will cater to able-bodied and adaptive clients.
“Some stroke survivors honestly go inside, hole up and don’t do anything,” he says. “That’s the thing I’m trying to affect the most. I’ve been put in this weird situation where I can impact some people.”
—Reporter: 541-633-2162, mhawryluk@bendbulletin.com