My name is Ruben, from Colombia, and this is my story

Share your story
,
1

Hi everyone. I want to tell my story and see if it sounds familiar to everyone and guide me through this.
I had a stroke back in February 5. Since august 2023 I’ve been having shoulder problems from exercising a bit too hard on the gym. It resulted in infiltrations in both my shoulders. Ingot into therapy and it triggered some spams in my neck and trapezius muscles for several months. In January I started with a couple of massage therapy sessions and the therapist made some neck manipulation maneuvers. The last session was the Friday before the Sunday everything manifested with very strong vertigo, nausea, vomiting. Afterwards I felt very cold and started trembling in my hands and legs and sweted a lot. I live alone so I got very scared and called my mom who toon me to the ER.
The doctor thought it was just some vertigo and was ready to dismiss me home, but the neurological team ran some tests, one MR in my brain and an angiotac which showed a dissection in my left vertebral artery and a small subacute stroke in my left cerebellum, with no hemorrhagic modification, I believe that is an ischemic stroke caused by artery dissection.

I was in the hospital for 5 days and got dismissed home with clopidogrel for 20 days and atorvastatin 40mg because my colesterol was a bit high (214) and aspirin as antiplatelet 100mg for at least 90 days each, with some pantoprazol to protect my stomach. They say my artery would recover in about 6 to 8 months.

I wanted to go home and I did for a couple of weeks. Sometimes I felt tired and using screens from my computer or my phone for a bit longer made me feel deezy and strange and asked my girlfriend and my mom a couple of times because I wasn’t feeling too well.

This episodes have kept happening a couple of times a week with a bit of vertigo, unrest and unease feeling, all mixed up with diarrhea or a bit constipated, specially in the afternoons, I believe from the meds. The night that I has the strong vertigo and went to the ER I was feeling my tommy a bit bad and also had diarrhea, did anyone felt this?

Because the episodes still happened and I was by myself, I got a lot scared and thought it was better for me to be accompanied by someone, so I moved to my mom’s house. She lives with my sister, my brother in law and two kids with plenty of room for me and my two dogs. So I’m living here for the last two weeks but I still been having episodes which I will describe to see if someone can give me a bit of light from their own experience.

Sometime the episodes start with vertigo and that sense of moving like I just got out from a boat, then I feel a bit deezy and tired.
Sometimes I feel like fainting spells and feel unease and unrest and with a bit of heavier vertigo and some nausea.
Sometimes paresthesia present in my hands and my head like needles in my fingers, and some neck and head pain, which presented that horrible sunday in February the 4th.
Sometimes I feel also pain in my legs and arms muscles, specially in my left hand. I do have a lot of tiredness and weakness in my legs and calfs, I suppose that can be the atorvastatin
Sometimes I get strange feeling in the left side of my face neck an jaw.
Sometimes I feel like I have to read slowly because words get a bit scrambled.
Some other times I feel confused and numb, like if I had a big balooned head.
Does anyone relate to any of this Symptoms?

Of course sometimes when I get these and some other feeling and symptoms I get worried, specially if the vertigo and nausea are a bit harder because all I can think of is that is another stroke coming.

I had my first control with my neurologist and he said that I looked fine but when I told him about fatigue and cerebellum consuming more energy he did not pay a lot of attention to it, maybe is something that doctors don’t tal about much. He said that there was a possibility that I could have had another stroke after the MRI was taken, but he was 99.9% sure that wasn’t the case. He ordered another MRI in April just to see how everything is going. He also told me that, since my stroke was caused by a “mechanical” maneuver, I had the same probability of a new stroke of someone who never had a stroke before.
He thinks that all my symptoms are a bit too mucho for the size of my stroke, he then recommended to see a psychiatrist to see if maybe anxiety, to what Im very prone to and had a crisis about six years ago related to my health when I experienced reactive hypoglicemia, could be ading up to my stroke related symptoms.

I want to tell you all that you are warriors. I think I’m very lucky because my stroke just left me majorly with vertigo and I think with some eye movement coordination problems, but that was it. The doctor said the stroke is very small but I still feel way bad and incapacitated, so my heart goes to everyone battling with a lot more of sequels and symptoms to get over.

I think we all share the fear of having another stroke and the debilitating recovery, but we will also share the strength that these episodes in air lives will leave.

Hope everybody is bit better every day. Stay strong everyone!

9 Likes
2

@roccello everyone’s stroke is different but when I had my stroke it presented with dizziness & nausea. All the sensations you describe of being on a boat ir like going to faint I get often & have done since my stroke 2 + years ago. I have been checked a couple times & no new stroke found. Could be same for you perhaps. It’s good that they’ve scheduled another MRI for you. That will help put your mind at rest.

I too had an artery dissection which was just left to heal. I believe it has healed but never really been told for sure.

Muscle pain could be statins. There are many different sorts so maybe ask for a different one to see if that helps.

Whatever the medics say fatigue can be a big issue after even a “small” stroke. Some of your symptoms could be as a result of fatigue. Try cutting back on your activity level a bit (even if you think you’re not doing much after a stroke you probably are) and see if that helps at all.

A lot of us keep a diary of activity & symptoms so we can see if there’s something that triggers the fatigue.

Wishing you all the best on your recovery journey.

Ann

4 Likes
3

Hi @roccello and welcome to the forum :people_hugging: I want to say all your symptoms are normal for strokes survivors.

However I won’t say that about the nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea, at least not until you’ve seen a GP! There are any number of causes for these symptoms symptoms, from vertigo, to slipped disk/spinal fracture, and adverse reactions to medications…and of course the flu.
Which one is causing you so much trouble needs to be investigated by a medical professional. And while you have not got this under control, you may be starving your body, your brain of the vital nutrients it really needs right now. And the first thing the GP should likely want are blood tests.

List all your current symptoms and take that with you, just to be sure you cover everything.

I wish you well on this road to recovery, there are bumps along the way but life will get easier, it’s just early days for you yet, take care :smile:

4 Likes
4

Dear Ruben,

How do you manage the severe vertigo? Vertigo usually exists with nausea. Terrible thing to have! Do you take Meclizine?

I want to give you my compassion. I hope this problem gets much better.

Take good care of yourself and stay strong.

Bye for now!

4 Likes
5

I like that you have been scheduled for another MRI. It will give you some answers. Psychiatry is not bad either, but I would have thought there was a different reason other than history, had the doctor not also scheduled the MRI. Personally, I would gladly go for psychology or psychiatry if I had been able to find someone, but I would have been angry about it if they did not also address my concerns. They should be able to better answer your other questions once they have seen the results of the new MRI. Most of my strokes were Vertebrobasilar/Thalamic. I cannot compare mine with yours, however I can say there are many symptoms associated with stroke, including nausea and vomiting. As pointed out earlier, those also are symptoms of so many other things, so the MRI will give you better answers.

2 Likes
6

Hi @Matthew1798
Vertigo got really hard just the day I went to ER. I had lay on the floor because everything was spinning so strong. After a couple of minutes it went away leaving me with trembling, feeling very cold and sweating profusely. I was able to stand and call my mom and get dressed by myself while hands and legs trembled hard. I had a lot of nausea but dis not come to vomiting.
I still felt the movement sensation but could walk.
While waiting on the ER i got a second vertigo, to call it somehow, this time a could not avoid vomiting because of the severe nausea.

I hav never felt the same vertigo again since that hideous night but the movement feeling like being on a boat is always a bit on sometimes a bit harder than others but very manageable.

I started vestibular therapy six sessions now but I haven’t take any medicines for it so far. Is has helped me to live and cope with it somehow bu facing round movements and coordination.
Hope it gets better with time, that is what everybody tells me.

3 Likes
7

Hi @roccello

Welcome.

While the collection of symptoms you describe is unique to you all of them are mentioned in different combinations by other members of this community. But that does not mean that any conclusion is safely generalised to your case.

You could very easily have things being caused by an ongoing condition and that could be interacting with the damage caused by the dissection and clot that you seemed to say had been diagnosed above.

As others have said you need advice from medically qualified people who can run tests.
I would suggest you attempt to get somebody cross discipline to act as a central point until there is a more specific diagnosis.

Vertigo can be treated in some cases with exercises that focus on moving the crystals in your inner ear, diarrhoea and constipation may be your mids or your stroke may have messed with your autonomic nervous system, anxiety is a common post stroke symptom

There are people who recover from their strokes in weeks or months. Most of us never recover everything but the majority of impacts either fade or we learn compensations to live with them within a year or two or three.

I suggest you keep reading here and you learn to use the magnifying glass icon at the top of the page - that is definitely the way to access the shared wisdom people have donated.

I wish you the best
Ciao
Simon
Ps You might find the welcome post Welcome - what we wish we'd heard at the start - Community - Stroke Association Online Community of some help

3 Likes
8

Please understand that I am not a medical professional, but this as you said above, is what concerns me the most. In conjunction with your vertigo, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea, you may have inadvertently caused some damage to your upper spine/neck. And that is why you need to discuss this with you gp and maybe get referred to Orthopaedics for further investigation.

Did you discuss any of this with the doctors in hospital at the time of your stroke? As this could very well be the route cause of your stroke. How old are you by the way, you never said, and while strokes can occur in all age groups, in younger people, if there’s no other underlying condition as the route cause, then usually its the like of sport related injury or accidents, and that’s what needs to be established in order to prevent any further episodes or worse. And if you need to push for this with your gp then do so.

I know it’s a pain in the proverbial having doctor and hospital visits but this is your life and your future you are concerned for. Of course if this has already been investigated and ruled out, then it’s still a case of back to the doctor for further investigation and a conclusion established be it stroke effect or otherwise.

image

2 Likes
9

Thank you for sharing how you improved. I am happy to hear that things are much better for you.

Please take good care of yourself.

All the best,
Matthew

4 Likes
10

Shwmae Rubin, welcome to the cerebellar stroke club, I had a bilateral cerebellar stroke three years ago. Most of your symptoms are familiar to me, I still feel like I am on a boat. I get giddy when I move. There are plenty of symptoms that relate to the oculomotor and vestibular system, this will result in nausea. All your other symptoms will be familiar to many of those in the early period of brain rewiring.

Fear of another stoke is particularly invasive for cerebellar stroke survivors because the post-stroke symptoms mimic the stroke symptoms. So, the brain is behaving with a flight or fight reaction to what it perceives to be a another threat to its wellbeing.

5 Likes
11

@EmeraldEyes thanks for your advice and concern.
I’ll try to be a bit more detailed so hopefully anyone can relate and maybe learn something from my story.
I’m 44, I do a lot of exercise and take care of myself in the faty and sugary departments my blood tests numbers are normally good and have kind of a healthy life. I used to be a heavy drinker and used to smoke a lot because I had a bar and it was a very edgy life. That was about 10 years ago when I sold the bar, quited smoking and reduced my alcohol intake a lot.
Back to my stroke the neurological team said that precisely because I had no other factors that would indicate a condition for the stroke they needed to run an angiotac and also a cervical MR. I have to thank that team because they followed a protocol which states that in “young” middle aged patients with vertigo and neck pain, they should suspect for a dissection.
The angiotac showed the dissection in my left vertebral artery but the cervical MR showed nothing more than some scoliosis along with lumbar and dorsal MR that where talen in the previous months to discard anything wrong happening with my spine because I was suffering shoulder pains from over exercise, this only showed just signals that my spine is no longer the one of a 15 years old jaja, so they concluded that the maneuvers practiced by the physiotherapist in the two weeks prior to my stroke resulted in the dissection that generated my stroke.

That protocol that the team followed I think is very important because not every ER team follows it and dissections are miss diagnosed and further bigger strokes tend to happen.

Still I’ll get your advice and follow my symptoms and talk to my doctor this week with a neurologist from my medical program so I get constant following in my recovery.

5 Likes
12

My result was the same, a dissection that when healing cause a blood clot, and I did that by cracking my neck. I too have mild scoliosis.

4 Likes
13

Keeping in mind, my strokes are different from yours, I also did vestibular training. I wish I could do more of it. I was told it would help in some of my issues but not all as some were from out of place crystals from lying flat on bed for so long. My other symptoms are caused by my eyes not working together as well as oscillopsia and downtrending nystagmus. (so vision issues). I hope the vestibular exercises will help you fully and that you enjoy them as much as I have. I suspect yours will be similar but varied from mine, as these are tailored to a particular patients issues.

3 Likes