Her children were grown. She was running for public office in Elmhurst. At 47, life appeared to be taking an exciting turn for Alice Doyle in 1985.
Then the headaches started during the final month of her campaign for city clerk. Terrible headaches, in the temples and forehead–and worse than any she had ever experienced.
“I figured they were tension headaches from worrying about the election,” said Doyle a few days ago. “I walked the whole city of Elmhurst to meet voters. But whenever I got up to speak to groups, that’s when my head started hurting.”
On Election Day, Doyle reluctantly went to the hospital before the polls even closed. The headaches were just too painful. She knew something was wrong.
Three weeks later, she awoke from a coma.
“I have good news and bad news,” said Dennis Doyle, the faithful husband at her bedside. “The good news is you won the election easily. The bad news is you had a stroke.”
A recent Gallup Poll showed that more than 90 percent of Americans don’t know sudden, severe headaches are a warning sign for strokes. In fact, most Americans don’t recognize any warning signs for strokes, which include a sudden weakness or numbness on one side of the body; loss of speech or trouble talking or understanding others; sudden dimness or loss of vision, particularly in one eye; and unexplained imbalances that last a few minutes.
Each symptom would appear serious enough to be noticed by afflicted people–although people with chronic migraine or adverse reactions to medications might have trouble telling the difference. It’s always best to consult your physician and be clear when to seek emergency medical care.
“A person might have crushing chest pain and know enough to seek medical attention for a heart attack,” said Dr. Daniel Homer, director of the Stroke Clinic at Evanston and Glenbrook Hospitals. “But I can’t tell you how many patients wake up in the middle of the night with a whole side that is weak or numb. I guess it’s denial or fear or maybe ignorance, but those people get up, use the bathroom and go back to sleep hoping it goes away.”
A mistake, said Homer. Just in the past several months, physicians have started using an emergency injectable anti-clotting drug that can stop or reverse a stroke if it’s caught within the first three hours.
Of course, strokes and heart attacks are different. Unlike a heart attack, which damages the heart muscle, a stroke adversely affects the brain by cutting off the supply of oxygen-rich blood. This can happen in a number of ways, including hardening of the brain artery, a blood clot traveling to the brain or the rupturing of the brain artery.
Without oxygen, brain cells die and can’t be replaced. The oxygen deprivation of a stroke can lead to death or disability such as loss of intellectual function, speech and body mobility.
The American Association of Neurological Surgeons, based in Park Ridge, has started an education campaign for all physicians identifying strokes as “brain attacks.” The American Heart Association is making plans to use the same term in a new patient awareness campaign.
One reason for the attention is to help people recognize the warning signs. Another is to inform doctors and patients that major strokes may be preceded by smaller ones called “transient ischemic attacks” (TIAs), such as Ann Doyle’s headaches.
“Stroke is the third most common cause of death in this country (behind coronary artery disease and cancer), and it is the number one adult disability,” said Homer. Of the half-million people a year who have strokes, 150,000 die.
“One reason behind this is it’s only been in the last 15 to 20 years that treatments have been discovered to prevent a stroke once a patient has experienced a warning spell.”
Those treatments include an aspirin regimen to thin the blood or surgery to clear affected arteries.
The risk factors for strokes include high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, heart disease, cigarette smoking, obesity and lack of physical activity.
African-Americans, as a group, are at greater risk for stroke than the general population. Homer and other Chicago area and northern Indiana physicians are conducting a study to investigate preliminary findings that show the anti-clotting drug ticlopidine is more effective than aspirin in preventing stroke among African-Americans.
The aim of neurologists at 22 area medical centers is to discover the best method of preventing a major stroke, saving people in the future from confronting the years of physical and psychological rehabilitation faced by such patients as Doyle. She has had to learn how to talk and walk again.
“What I would tell people is, if you smoke–stop,” said Doyle, who still has occasional seizures and short-term memory loss. “I was drinking coffee and smoking two packs a day to get energized for the campaign. That’s probably what pushed me over the edge.”
