‘I Thought My Headaches and Nosebleeds Were From Allergies—They Were the First Signs of a Stroke’

Like so many other women, I was constantly go-go-going. My job as an assistant professor of psychology at a medical school kept me busy—teaching and mentoring students on best medical practices, leading student organizations and facilitating faculty orientations. And then at home, I was married with three kids, all of whom were active in sports. 

At the time, I wore that as a badge of honor—I had so much going on that I was too busy to do self-care. I’d go to the doctor once a year, and if everything was fine at the check-up, that was it. 

In 2016, a couple of months after my routine doctor’s visit, I started having really intense headaches. I attributed these to the fact that it was February, and spring, AKA peak allergy season, was right around the corner.

Typically, my allergies to pollen and dust were chronic enough that I would get allergy shots a couple of times a month. I had skipped some shots because of the wintery weather, and I thought maybe that’s why I was getting the headaches. I took ibuprofen or whatever I had laying around as a headache remedy, then March and April rolled around.

By June, I was still having the dull headaches. 

Around that time, someone at work said to me, “You don’t look like yourself.”

I was like: I’m stressed, I’m a mom, I’m working full time—there was a lot going on. But hearing that concern stuck with me. 

The next weekend, I still had a headache but was taking it easy. On Sunday, I drove over to my sister’s house to meet her new puppy.

As I was driving, I looked down at one point and noticed blood was all over my clothes. I had a gushing nosebleed, which had never really happened to me before. Once I got home, I decided to lie in bed, thinking it was some combination of stress and allergies causing the headaches and bleeding.  

Monday morning rolled around, and I still had a headache, but I popped an ibuprofen and headed to work.

Throughout my half hour drive to work, I thought I was having car trouble. I couldn’t get my car to go over 25 miles per hour and couldn’t get it to stop. Luckily, I hit mostly green lights along the way, but then I came to a huge intersection with a red light—and couldn’t stop my car. 

I still thought, “It’s my car. It’s not me.”

Thankfully, I didn’t hit any other cars, and no one hit me.

I hit what felt like a pothole and came to a stop with a flat tire. Since I was only 10 minutes away from work, I wanted to make it the rest of the way so I could stop in a familiar location to have my tire fixed. The typical faculty parking lot was full, so I pulled into the back lot, facing away from the university. 

I put the car in park, and that’s the last thing I remember. 

From there, I couldn’t move. Apparently, I texted a voice message to colleagues in my department about having car trouble, but I didn’t mention that I was in the university parking lot.

I was conscious but not fully aware of what was happening, and I didn’t want to bother my husband, who was working almost an hour away from me in Cleveland, Ohio.

I was in this state for two and a half hours.

Finally, sometime around 11 a.m., I was able to get on Facebook—using my left hand—and contacted my sister. I sent her some garbled message, and my sister, a nurse, immediately called to ask what was wrong. Because of my mumbling, she thought maybe I was being held at gunpoint. 

My sister called 911 and my husband, who called the university police.

The campus police kept reassuring me, “You’re going to be OK.” But it didn’t feel that way—they had to carry me to the ambulance because I couldn’t walk. I also couldn’t talk and lost bladder control. 

Once the paramedics arrived, they confirmed that I was having a stroke.

Lying in the ambulance, I was thinking: I’m 51. I’m so young. I can’t be having a stroke.

But I couldn’t say anything back. 

I spent five days in the hospital and learned that a blood clot had traveled to the left side of my brain, paralyzing the right side of my body. That’s why my foot was on the car’s gas pedal, but I couldn’t adjust it to accelerate or decelerate, and why I hit the pothole.

The headaches and nosebleed were most likely from my skyrocketing blood pressure. My blood pressure reading in the ambulance that day was 210 over 110 instead of the standard 120 over 80, which I typically had. 

After getting out of the hospital, I took three months of medical leave. In September, I went back to work full-time, thinking I was healed. 

But as I was teaching and talking, colleagues would pull me aside to ask if something was wrong. I was doing presentations I’ve done in my sleep, but I couldn’t get the words out. I was either talking so fast that it was difficult for other people to understand me, or I was uncharacteristically quiet. 

I decided to take a day off from work to get neurological testing at the Cleveland Clinic.

It turned out that I had lost a significant number of brain cells during my stroke while sitting in my car for hours. I learned that I had aphasia, a disability from damage to the brain that affects communication and speech. At least, I finally had a diagnosis that matched what people were telling me. 

By late 2017, I knew I had a longer road to recovery. 

I made the decision to leave my job and focus on my well-being, including speech therapy and mental health counseling. Quitting my job was the hardest thing for me to do, letting go of everything I had worked for throughout my whole career.

Along with physical therapy and speech therapy—working on the stuttering and slowing down my speech—I spent time in counseling dealing with this newfound identity; there was a lot of loss and grieving for my old life. 

Eventually, I went back to some of the things I was passionate about: doing some advocacy work and presentations for the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women, as well as mentoring a small group of medical students at the university on proper bedside manner as a clinician.

I also had a newfound perspective as a patient.

When I was in the hospital, doctors would look at my husband instead of me to answer questions, when their focus should always be on the patient—however they need to communicate. 

You are your own best advocate, and I always tell women that you have to listen to your body. If something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t right.

I never asked for help and only went to the doctor once per year. One nosebleed didn’t seem like a red flag for me to call my doctor, but the months of chronic headaches weren’t normal for me. I just put a bandage over the problem by taking ibuprofen. 

Now, any time I get a headache, which is rare, I evaluate whether I had too much salt, am dehydrated or didn’t get enough sleep. If none of those things ring true, it could be a warning sign that my blood pressure is rising. It is so important to pay attention to your normal and to tend to your stress levels.

It took me a long time to accept the fact that I had a stroke.

To me, it always seemed like strokes only happened to “old people.” But I learned that it’s not humanly possible to be on a constant hamster wheel—going and going, teaching and trying to do everything at home. I discovered the importance of taking a beat to manage stress levels. Sometimes, your body teaches you life lessons the hard way.