Mbeki honours great South Africans

Claire Penn: For excellent contribution to the field of speech and language pathology, especially in the area of linguistics, sign language, child language, aphasia and head injury and producing groundbreaking research in understanding the complexities of human communication.

Intracerebral clot clean-up

Stroke is the leading cause of life-threatening neurologic disease and the third leading cause of death in the United States, with an incidence of 500,000 cases per year. In the past there was no effective treatment. Recently intra-arterial thrombolysis has emerged as a promising treatment for strokes. At University Hospitals of Cleveland, in a trial of intra-arterial urokinase, 85% of patients showed angiographic evidence of recanalization and 61% showed excellent or good neurologic improvement. A 15% complication rate and 15% death rate was noted however. Further studies will be needed to prove whether this is an effective treatment.

PA view of left internal carotid artery (ICA) injection demonstrates occlusion of the distal M1 segment of the middle cerebral artery (MCA).

PA view of a left ICA injection, after the administration of 500,000 units of intra-arterial urokinase, demonstates normal filling of the left MCA and its branches.

Patient had right hemiparesis and aphasia as leading symptoms.

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Sen. Tim Johnson second chance at life and work

Naamua - Life beyond Loss

Earlier this week we covered a topic which is close to my heart, and with the statistics being as they are, possibly close to yours too. Mark McEwan—the veteran broadcaster—came on to talk about his challenging recovery from a stroke. A terrible affliction, but one that affects 700,000 Americans a year making it the third largest cause of death behind heart disease and cancer.

Mark’s recovery is a true inspiration: he lost the ability to speak and walk, but now walks well and speaks with only mild impairment. He joins the 6 million or so stroke survivors living in the United States. But while more and more people—like Mark—escape death from stroke, the disease is still a leading cause of serious disability.

When my father suffered his fatal stroke—officially labeled a “massive cranial bleed”-- he already knew what it was like to live with disability. Ten years earlier, a blood clot on his spine had left him paralyzed from the waist down meaning he not only became a wheel chair user, but also suffered various health complications. He had to move into a long-term care facility years before he even reached retirement age, and he felt life was all but over.

But then came a ray of light in the form of a nurse named “Mary”. If you believe in these things, you might have called her an angel. A truly beautiful, selfless person who warms the world of everyone she comes into contact with. She had never seen my father walk, play tennis, cook, garden or many of his other favorite pursuits, yet she fell in love with him just the same. They spent 7 happy years together, despite my father’s deteriorating health, and then came the stroke.

The bleed took my father’s life so quickly, Mary had literally given him a cup of tea and the TV remote 2 hours before. I guess it was the very definition of going quietly in your sleep. Considering his health issues including constant infections and almost complete loss of sight, you might call his passing a painful blessing. He got a brief respite from suffering to experience true happiness, before being permanently relieved of pain.

It is devastating to lose someone you love, as I’m sure most of you know. But perhaps for the person themselves there are times when death is welcome

Life Lessons: The great escape

..........But maybe for him denial stopped working. His disease already had a name, one less likely to stop traffic than Alzheimer's: aphasia, word loss. And it held. For years. Aphasia seemed to cover all the territory, since there were few giveaways in his behavior. He carried a dictionary definition in his pocket and showed it to people he would be meeting for the first time. "Aphasia," it said, "is partial or total loss of the ability to articulate ideas or comprehend spoken or written language, resulting from damage to the brain caused by injury or disease."...........