"Time Lost is Brain Lost"

I woke up at 0430 and I couldn't get out of bed. Oh, that's weird, I thought. My right arm was completely numb from the shoulder all the way down to the fingertips. After about two minutes I jumped out of bed but I fell straight down onto the floor with a crash. My legs were weak -- it was like the right side of my body didn't exist!

My wife awoke in the commotion and asked me what was wrong.

I opened my mouth to talk to her, but nothing came out! I could understand her but my words weren't there.

After about three minutes, I got up and I said "oh, I'm okay now." I took a shower (there was still some numbness in the arm) and went to work. I figured something was probably going wrong so I called the doctor and he told me to go to the ER.

Lucky thing too... it sounds like you had a mini-stroke or what we call a"transient ischemic attack," (TIA) -- a temporary event. The residual numbness suggests more long term damage though. Since you're right-handed, you are most likely left-brained -- and your language is controlled by that side of your brain too. When you had the brain ATTACK (as threatening as a heart attack!), you wiped out your left brain, paralyzing your right body and knocking out your ability to talk.

We call this right-sided Hemiparesis (weakness) or hemiplegia (no movement), right hemineglect (inability to register things on the right side of the world) and Broca's aphasia (inability to verbalize thoughts; staccato, halting speech.)

I went over the ABCD2 scale with him and calculated a moderate risk for stroke:

2-Day Stroke Risk: 4.1%.
7-Day Stroke Risk: 5.9%.
90-Day Stroke Risk: 9.8%.

We started him on clopidogrel (Plavix) and he is undergoing a cardiac workup to rule out an embolic cause for his TIA/stroke.

In stroke patients, further assessment is done with the NIH Stroke Scale.

An pdf of the NIH Stroke Scale is available at http://www.ninds.nih.gov/doctors/stroke_scale_training.htm

An online course for provider education is available on
http://www.strokeassociation.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=3023009