It took more than a day for Garima Dwivedi to realize she had a stroke.
“It started with a headache,” she said. “A really bad headache. I don’t usually get headaches so that was odd.”
She was on her way to work, but decided to go visit her doctor instead.
Because she was healthy – she ate well, she didn’t smoke, she was active and she was relatively young at just 47 – her doctor diagnosed her with a sinus infection and sent her home with a prescription for antibiotics.
“I was waiting for the antibiotics to kick in, thinking this will get better by tonight, tomorrow morning, and it wasn’t getting better. It was getting worse,” she said.
Her teenage son came home the next day to find her having a seizure. She told him she must just be having a reaction to the antibiotics.
“I was coming in and out of consciousness and my daughter came home and by that time, when she was asking me questions, it was like I had marbles in my mouth.”
Her daughter drove her back to the doctor, where she was immediately put in an ambulance. Dwivedi doesn’t remember much of her first few days in hospital.
“I was in denial. Those first few weeks, I wouldn’t admit that I had had a stroke,” she said. “Probably because I thought, ‘I’m healthy. I take care of myself.’ I couldn’t imagine why I would be having a stroke.”
Women and stroke
She didn’t know what was going on, and many Canadian women would likely be in a similar position. According to a new report by the Heart & Stroke Foundation of Canada, only 60 per cent of women knew what a stroke was. Few knew the signs – more than a third couldn’t name any of the common signs of stroke.
Heart & Stroke wants women to be more aware. “They always seem to be the one who’s there, whether the stroke is happening to them or in somebody else,” said Patrice Lindsay, director of stroke for Heart & Stroke.
“If they can’t recognize the signs and know what to do about it, that’s quite serious.”
Although women account for slightly less than half of Canada’s 62,000 annual strokes, they affect women more than men in some ways, she said.
If women have a stroke themselves, they are more likely to suffer severe outcomes and are one-third more likely to die than men. This is partly because women tend to be older when they suffer a stroke, which can affect their ability to recover, she said. Women are also less likely to access rehabilitation programs and might take a little longer to get treatment – critical when every minute of delay can mean more dead brain cells.
Women also tend to be caregivers for spouses and family members, Lindsay said, and so might take on a lot of responsibilities for helping others with their strokes.
The signs of stroke
For all these reasons, women need to be more aware of the signs and risks of stroke, Lindsay said.
Women face elevated risk when they’re pregnant, when taking oral contraceptives with estrogen, when they reach menopause and when they’re over the age of 75.
This is in addition to risk factors common to both sexes, like high blood pressure and smoking.
The signs of stroke can be summed up in the acronym FAST:
F – Face: Is it drooping?
A – Arms: Can you raise both?
S – Speech: Is it slurred or jumbled?
T – Time to call 911 right away.
Women need to listen to their bodies if they think something is wrong, said Dwivedi. “I probably should have gone back to the doctor’s again the next morning rather than thinking it’s just a reaction to the antibiotics or the sinus infection.”
WATCH: The Heart and Stroke Foundation wants people to know the four signs of a stroke by using FAST – face, arms, speech, time.
Recovery was slow. She had to learn how to write again, and even remembering words was a challenge.
At the grocery store, she couldn’t recall the names of foods.
“I knew in my head what it was but I couldn’t remember the name for it. So that yellow thing, OK, that’s a banana.”
Four years later, she still has trouble recalling French and Hindi words especially, though she spoke both these languages well before her stroke. She now uses her computer mouse with her left hand instead of her right and her right eye droops slightly when she’s tired, she said.
“Recovery is long-term. It’s not going to happen overnight.”
Lindsay urges women to be their own self-advocates if they think they might be having a stroke. “If you know something’s not right, you have to push to get the care and investigations that you need. We tend not to push hard enough.”
“Don’t dismiss things because you feel pressured to look after everyone else.”