TAMPA — On Saturday, 30,000 people will be walking the streets around Raymond James Stadium for the fourth largest Heart Walk in the nation.
If you've ever taken a CPR course, benefited from a clot-busting drug or enjoyed a smoke-free restaurant, you can appreciate projects funded by events like this walk, which benefits the American Heart Association-American Stroke Association's research and education efforts. Since 1990, the Tampa events have raised $19.2-million; this year the goal is $3-million.
And if you go, look for adults wearing red baseball caps and children wearing red capes. They are survivors of heart disease or stroke.
For years, Kristen Powers, 37, helped recruit co-workers to raise donations and walk as a team. She never expected to be wearing a red cap.
Powers was training for an Iron Man competition in 2011 when she had a bike accident that sent her to the hospital. Doctors stitched up a cut on her forehead, and Powers and her husband left to return to their St. Petersburg home.
Getting in the car, she dropped her cell phone and couldn't figure out how to pick it up.
"I couldn't move my right side at all," said Powers. "I tried to speak to my husband and it came out as gibberish. I turned to look at him and he said the right side of my face was drooping."
He hustled her back inside the hospital where testing revealed Powers was having a massive stroke.
She woke up two days later in a different hospital. She didn't fully understand what had happened, but knew one thing: "I had a long road toward recovery."
While the majority of the 795,000 Americans who have a stroke each year are over age 65, a quarter occur in those who are younger. Some, like Powers, are in top shape with no known stroke risk factors.
"We're not sure why, but their numbers are increasing," said Dr. Matthew Berlet, an interventional neuroradiologist and medical director of the Comprehensive Stroke Center at St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa. A 2010 American Heart Association study found that strokes in people ages 20 to 45 were up more than seven percent in 2005 compared to the mid-1990s, possibly because of the increase in obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes in young people.
"We see more than 1,000 stroke patients a year at our center and we may see up to 20 annually who are under the age of 40. We've had a 19 year old stroke patient," said Berlet.
His advice to people of all ages: Know the warning signs of stroke and immediately call 911.
"Don't go lie down and think you will wake up feeling better. The brain is exquisitely sensitive to a lack of blood flow," he said. "Time is brain. The sooner you get medical help the better."
Regardless of age, stroke is treated in much the same way, usually with the clot busting drug tPA. Most strokes are caused by a blockage, usually a blood clot, in one of the tiny vessels of the brain.
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Explore all your optionsIn order to be effective, tPA must be administered within a few hours of symptoms starting. Because Powers had her stroke in the parking lot of a hospital prepared to treat stroke, she got the drug in minutes.
But her case was unusual. Powers' vessel was blocked by a tiny fibrous tumor that had broken free from her heart and traveled directly to her brain. When tPA didn't work, Powers was immediately transferred to Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, where doctors used a special device known as the Merci Retrieval System to pull the tumor out, restoring blood flow.
Powers spent months in rehabilitation to learn again how to walk, talk, write, think and express herself. In 2011, her coworkers at McNichols Company, a supplier and fabricator of specialty metal products, participated in the Heart Walk in her honor. Now back to work and all her athletic pursuits, Powers says she is still regaining fine motor function every day, but marvels at how far she has come.
"Just being able to walk again was really amazing to me,'' she said. "It's such a joy to be able to celebrate my health and everyone else's.''
Contact Irene Maher at imaher@tampabay.com