This Woman Had A Stroke At 25 And 4 Years Later Still Has No Idea What Caused It

Being able to recognize the warning signs can save your life, no matter your age.
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Bennet with her son, Bryson, and daughter, BrookeCourtesy of Jessica Bennett

At 25, Jessica Bennett had no known health issues, was active, and lived a busy life taking care of two kids plus working full-time and attending school. She never would have guessed when she fell ill one night in November 2012, after a hectic day of work, that she was having a stroke.

“When I got home that day, I had a really bad headache, it was severe to the point where my vision was blurry. I was dizzy and felt fatigued,” Bennett tells SELF. She powered through, making dinner for her two kids, one 3 years old and the other 3 months old at the time. While standing at the stove, she felt like she was going to pass out, so she went to lie down for a minute. “At this point, the headache had gotten worse, to the point where I couldn’t even stand up if I tried. I felt what felt like fire going through my veins, like an electric current going through my entire right side, causing excruciating pain,” she recounts. She tried to get up to find her boyfriend, but her limbs were numb on both sides so she had to call out for help.

Bennett says her boyfriend got her and the kids into the car and drove to the hospital. “My speech had started to slur, and I was discombobulated and sweating. My face was really pale. At that point I knew something was really wrong.” She’s lucky she got to the ER when she did. Doctors immediately recognized she was having a stroke, and gave her life-saving blood-thinners to prevent a clot from reaching her brain. “The doctors let me know I could have passed away if he hadn’t gotten me to the hospital as soon as he did,” she says.

When a young person has a stroke, doctors often can’t figure out why—and can’t predict whether or not it will happen again.

“We see incidence of stroke rising in younger people,” Mary Ann Bauman, M.D., former chair of the American Stroke Association Advisory Committee and National American Heart Association board member, tells SELF. “It’s not terribly common, but every time it happens it’s devastating.” According to a May 2016 study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, there could be a few things contributing to this increase—including rising rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes, poor lifestyle habits like illicit drug use and alcohol abuse, and simply the fact that more strokes are identified today. But more research needs to be done to figure out what's truly responsible.

Research shows that among young stroke patients, the most common cause is actually unknown. A stroke with an undetermined cause is called cryptogenic. “There are about 800,000 strokes each year—that’s one every 40 seconds. Somebody dies every 4 minutes” says Bauman. “We estimate about 200,000 are cryptogenic.” The American Heart Association study also notes that at least half of overall stroke in patients younger than 30 are cryptogenic.

The problem with this is that doctors are left with no understanding of why it happened, and therefore have a harder time knowing the best way to prevent another one. “Not knowing what caused the stroke causes a lot of frustration and anxiety,” Bauman says. “Because how do we treat a person if we don’t know what caused it?”

Bennett’s doctors ran numerous tests, including doing an echocardiogram to check for an irregular heartbeat and holes in her heart, and investigated her health and family history, but were unable to come up with a convincing theory as to why she suffered the stroke. Bennet says her diagnosis of cryptogenic stroke was extremely frustrating. “I was told I could have another at any time for any reason, so that’s a scary fear I have to live with forever, knowing this might happen again,” she says.

Four years later, Bennett, now 29, is almost completely recovered and is looking for ways to help other young stroke survivors deal with the aftermath.

When it first happened, Bennett was told to expect to never be able to walk or use her right side ever again. After three weeks in the hospital and then two months in a rehab facility where she underwent physical and occupational therapy, she had regained about 85 percent of mobility back in her arm. She went home with a walker and a cane, where she continued to do outpatient therapy. She also went to psychotherapy. “It helped me with emotional distress. I just ended the therapy about a year ago,” she says.

Now Bennett is close to 100 percent recovered, though she still has bad days where she feels weak or so tired she needs to lie down. She’s working full-time and pursuing a degree in physical therapy, a career path she chose after her own time in rehab. “There aren’t as many stroke survivors in my age bracket, so I’d like to help some people that are around my age. It’s really frustrating, especially in a rehab facility, when there’s no one to relate to you,” she says. “Sometimes it would have been great to have an outlet. It would be awesome if I could be that for someone.”

Bennett with her mother after her white coat ceremony, a rite of passage in medical schools that signifies a student's transition from classwork to the clinical portion of a degree program.

Courtesy of Jessica Bennett
After a stroke with an unknown cause, the best way to prevent another is to adopt the same healthy habits that can lower everyone's stroke risk.

“The major way to avoid stroke still remains controlling high blood pressure, because the most common reason for a stroke is hypertension,” Bauman says. Bennett now takes better care of herself—eating more fruits and veggies, watching her diet overall, and working out more often—to try and be as healthy as possible.

She also pays close attention to her body, to make sure she doesn’t miss any warning signs that a stroke is hitting again. “For me that would be extreme headache or fatigue, and dizziness. If at any point if I feel that again, I immediately get to an ER.” She’s gone a few times, mostly because of a migraine, which she never used to get before her stroke.

Bauman stresses the acronym FAST, which covers the most universal warning signs of stroke: face drooping, arm weakness, and speech difficulty. The T stands for “Time to call 911.” “People wait a while and think it’ll go away, they’ll shake it off,” Bauman says. Maybe you think it’d be embarrassing to cry wolf. But there’s a finite timeframe that doctors can administer clot-busting drugs. “If you miss that window of time, they’re not going to work.” If something feels off, get help immediately. There’s never any shame in looking out for your health.