Anytime you have a situation like chronic high blood pressure, too much cholesterol, and you find that you like your Big Mac with fries three times a day too much to give it up, you might start to get a little worried for your health; and when your wife mentions a six-pack, if you find yourself thinking of an actual six-pack of beer and not your abs, you'd better believe it when the doctors are telling you that you just put yourself on the expressway to a stroke, a wheelchair and a drool cup. Of course, people will give you stroke prevention advice all over the place - you know the drill, exercise, eat your broccoli, and lay off the drink. But what if there were something about a situation that was a high risk of a stroke, but that kind of advice was never passed around? Because you weren't forty and overweight; you were in fact ten, and weighed about 75 pounds?
Could that even happen? No one could be healthier than an active and happy ten-year-old. Why on earth should they get a blockage in an artery leading up to the brain, that would cut them down and confine them to a wheelchair? If you have never heard of this, don't blame yourself. Apparently, doctors haven't really heard that much about this either.: even as strokes kill babies and children under 18 at the rate of about 10,000 every year. How would you even begin with seizure- and stroke-prevention in a husky young child?
Children who get seizures, often get them right after an injury of some kind. Doctors suspect that sometimes, falling down a certain way, can injure an internal artery, so that a tiny clot forms; the clot can travel to the brain, and cause whatever damage it can. Lots of children who fall to the stroke, do so because when they arrive at hospital, most doctors can't believe what they are seeing; and they take several hours weeding out every other possibility. And every hour that the clot remains lodged in there, cutting off blood to some part of the brain, cells keep dying - permanently. Stroke prevention may not be very realistic for young children; but preventing needless delay, even in the order of minutes, is something that can simply be prevented, with public education, and more awareness among doctors. Sometimes, if the doctors seem to take too much time to diagnose the stroke, you could get results by demanding that a neurologist see your child no matter what the emergency room medic says.
The good news with children who get strokes is that when the brain is still young, it can quickly reroute and rewire brain functions so that new parts of the brain can cope with the tasks that have been disrupted by the brain damage. It might take a year or so, but most of the time, the automatic self-repair the brain performs is remarkable. Of course, the initial treatment takes quite a bit of money; if you don't have good health insurance, there is little you can do. Excellent health insurance, knowledge, and the boldness to demand what you need of a hospital and good doctors, are all essential parts of catching a stroke at the right time. Stroke prevention may not be possible ever; but carelessness and delay prevention, are certainly possible here and now.
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