Many people find it difficult not to roll their eyes anytime they spot someone taking a selfie, but for one Michigan woman, the act served as a lifesaving alarm.
Juanita Branch was snapping a few selfies recently with the intention of changing her Facebook profile picture when she noticed that her face was drooping on one side and her mouth was twisting.
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“I do it once in a blue moon for my Facebook page,” Branch said to Macomb Daily. “I can’t remember the last time I took one, maybe a year ago.”
What the 63-year-old did remember, however, is that drooping and twisting on one side of the face are physical signs of a stroke. A fact she was all too aware of since she had suffered a mini-stroke in 2016.
“A lot of people think it hurts when you have a stroke but it doesn’t. When you see symptoms, you need to call someone right away.”
Branch immediately called for help, and by the time the ambulance arrived, she had lost her balance and her speech was slurred.
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When she arrived at the hospital, her selfies once again swooped in to save the day. By looking at the timestamps on the images, the attending physician was able to calculate when her stroke started and what kind of medication she was eligible for.
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“From the timestamp on her selfie photos, we were able to determine that Juanita was within the four-hour window to receive the clot-busting drug tPA,” Dr. Jason Muir, the emergency room doctor, said.
Tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) is a medication that dissolves blood clots and helps to restore blood flow to the brain tissue during an ischemic stroke episode. It is only effective if administered within the first few hours of a stroke, and is credited with resolving or improving stroke symptoms in one out of every three patients who receive it. However, it cannot be used outside of the first few hours of the onset of stroke symptoms.
He also noted that this was the first time he had seen someone notice their own stroke symptoms in this manner — they’re usually caught by someone else.
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According to the Heart & Stroke Foundation, approximately 62,000 strokes occur in Canada every year and more than 400,000 people are living with long-term disability due to stroke. It’s also the No. 1 cause of premature death in women. Doctors encourage people to use the acronym FAST to determine when you or someone else might be experiencing a stroke:
- Face: is it drooping?
- Arms: can you raise them both?
- Speech: is it slurred or jumbled?
- Time: to call 911
As for Branch, this experience has taught her not to be so quick to pass judgment on people snapping selfies. She even said she might write a book titled How a Selfie Saved My Life.
“If I had been sitting on the couch watching television, I might have never realized I was having a stroke,” she said. “That selfie literally did save my life.”
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