Doctors dismissed 3 stroke symptoms in young people as drugs and migraines

• About 10% of strokes occur in people under the age of 50, so young people are prone to misdiagnosis.
• Insider shared the stories of two young stroke victims who doctors assumed suffered from migraines.
• Another young stroke survivor said doctors were convinced she had been on drugs or had a hangover.

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When Hailey Beiber had a stroke in March at the age of 25, it forced fans and followers to face an underestimated fact: strokes can and do happen to young people.

Indeed, about 10% of stroke victims are under 50 years old, Dr. Donald M. Lloyd-Jonespresident of the American Heart Association, has already told Insider.

Yet doctors (and patients) may overlook the signs and attribute them to more common culprits like stress, drug or alcohol useor migraine. Consequently, some patients may never fully recover. “Minutes matter in terms of preserving brain tissue and brain function,” Lloyd-Jones said.

Insider covered the stories of three young people whose symptoms were not taken seriously due, at least in part, they say, to their age. Here’s how they paid the price, and what they would have liked instead.

A 20-year-old was sent home from the ER with a migraine diagnosis even though he couldn’t walk

Xavier Ortiz was playing basketball when a few of his buddies, who are nurses, noticed his deviant eye. They urged him to go to the emergency room, where he complained of classic stroke signs like a severe headache, sensitivity to light, blurred vision, dizziness and numbness on one side of his body. his body, his girlfriend, Natasha Sanchez, told the insider.

But the clinician told them it was a migraine, gave Ortiz an IV and painkillers, and discharged him, Sanchez said. She and Ortiz’s mother, who had joined them at the time, had to carry him to the car.

The next day, Ortiz started convulsing in bed. An ambulance took him to hospital, where clinicians suspected he had taken drugs. It wasn’t until the next day when a second neurologist examined Ortiz’s disease brain scansthat the family learned that he had suffered a serious stroke and that he had only a 3% chance of survival.

Ortiz, who lives in New Jersey and had graduated from technical college shortly before his stroke, survived, although a year after the stroke he could no longer speak, walk or take care of himself. even, said her mother-in-law, Jackie Ortiz.

She wonders what might have happened if her husband had taken Xavier Ortiz to the ER that first night. It’s in his nature to stand up to authority figures like doctors and, research suggests, Doctors are less likely to enlighten a man than a young person or a woman.

“Maybe things would have been different for us,” Jackie Ortiz said.

Brittany Scheier takes care to eat well and move often after her stroke.

American Heart Association Go Red for Women

Doctors were sure drugs had caused 27-year-old woman’s symptoms

Doctors encouraged Brittany Scheier to confess. “They kept asking me, ‘Did you do drugs? It’s okay.’ [if you did],” the Texas-based attorney told the insider.

But Scheier, who was 27 at the time, had nothing to reveal except that she had celebrated her birthday at vineyards the day before. Then, in the middle of the night, she woke up with extreme nausea and ran to the bathroom to vomit.

“All of a sudden I realized I couldn’t move the right side of my body. I tried to get up, I couldn’t. I tried to reach for things, I couldn’t. not,” Scheier said. Her vision narrowed to a pinprick and she screamed for her roommates, who carried her inert body to a car and drove her to the emergency room.

Clinicians ordered a CT scan five hours after he arrived. Scheier had had a stroke. “It was just shocking,” she said, “I thought strokes were just something that happened to people my grandparents’ age.”

Scheier recovered with months of medication and various outpatient therapies. She had to learn to drive and could not be left alone as her depth of perception and coordination made walking difficult.

Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, a New York cardiologist, told Insider Scheier that the experience shows how essential it is for women – who are more likely to have strokes and die from them than men – to defend themselves.

“So many times I hear, ‘I was listening to the doctor. Maybe they’re right,'” she said. But “nobody lives in our body. We know when we’re not well.”

Jenna Goldman is recovering from her stroke in hospital (left) and two years later.

Jenna Goldman

A 26-year-old woman felt invisible in the ER because of her age

Jenna Goldman had learned to cope with her occasional but debilitating eye migraines: “Take me home, put a rag over my head, sit in a dark room for a few hours and relax,” Goldman, then aged 26 years old, told the insider.

But one day in 2020, those tools didn’t work. Goldman, a marketing and events professional In New York, she developed numbness on the left side of her body, could not move or speak, and began to sweat – and vomit – profusely.

“I felt like something was grabbing my body and throwing me to the ground. I had no idea what was going on,” she said.

But at the hospital, which was overrun with COVID patients, Goldman was not a priority. “The lights are so bright, I’m in so much pain, I haven’t had any water, I’m just a big mess and no one is treating me,” she said. “They just think I’m a girl with a migraine.”

The following day, Goldman underwent an MRI, which revealed that she had undergone several shots through his brain.

Goldman spent three months in physiotherapy and, more than two years later, still had trouble concentrating, tired and hot easily, and lacked sensation in his left side.

Doctors eventually linked her stroke to her birth control pills, which increase the risk of stroke — especially in people with ocular migraines.

“If my gynecologist had ever told me that migraines and birth control don’t go together,” she said, “then I would have stopped anything estrogen-related.”