‘When My Brakes Failed’ – By Sophia Anna-Faria

“It’s a Thursday afternoon and I’m racing to get my deadlines finished before the end of day. Work is always busy in my profession as a caseworker. A normal day for me involved handling complex client enquiries, supporting older adults in the community.

I glance at the clock, it’s 2.00pm and I haven’t eaten all day. My half drunk coffee stares at me as a reminder of my chaotic lifestyle. I force myself out from my desk and go into the kitchen to put a piece of toast in the toaster. I wobble as I walk to the toaster. I’ve had the worst dizziness all week, but my doctors tell me I’m fine. As I reach for a plate out of the overhead cupboard, the room spins and my head slams into the wood.

Oh god.

I shake my head and try to focus. I open a jar of Nutella – I need sugar – and take some juice out of the fridge. Not my healthiest lunch choice but I don’t have time today. It’s only when the toast pops, I notice the throbbing, searing pain beginning in my forehead and wrapping around the base of my neck. I peer in the hallway mirror and I’m stunned to see a massive welt the size of a golf ball appear on my head. My vision blurs as I try to focus.

Ok, that’s not good. But everyone experiences head strikes occasionally right?

Something tells me I should see my GP just to be on the safe side, so I call my boss and tell him what’s happened.
“I should be back by 3.30pm,” I say, holding a bag of peas to my head. “I’ve been a bit clumsy.”
Trying hard to ignore the stabbing pain in my head, I call the doctor’s office. My GP is unavailable, but another doctor can see me. Great. I book in for that day.

In the waiting room, my vision focuses in and out on the form they ask me to complete and as I walk into the doctor’s office, I wobble more. The doctor is chatty. He asks me where I’m from as he straps a blood pressure cuff around my arm. We talk about my birth diagnosis of Sickle Cell and how misunderstood it is. He shines a torch in my eyes, talking animatedly.

“Everyone strikes their heads occasionally. Looks like a mild concussion.” I sigh in relief. “So the dizziness and migraine will go away?” The doctor nods confidently. “Couple days, take some panadol.”

As I get up to leave, he hesitates. “But, if you get sudden onset of vertigo and have severe
vision troubles, present to emergency.”

Those words stuck with me.

What comes to mind when you think about the word ‘stroke’? For me, I remember the ‘FAST resource’ we’re all taught as health workers.

Watch out for:

Facial droop
Arm weakness
Slurred speech
Time. Call 000

Keep those signs in mind.

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Four days after a doctor told me I had just had a mild concussion after hitting my head, I was sitting in bed watching a movie, minding my own business, when I suffered an ischemic stroke. One minute I was laughing at a scene in a movie and the next, the entire room was spinning. Do you remember being a kid on a merry go-round? As it gets faster, you try to hold on tighter as the world blurs. That’s what my stroke felt like. I slammed my laptop case down, and stood up as the floor melted in front of me.

“Help me!” I cried out to my house mate, slumping against my bedroom door.

No response.

I screamed again, bashing on any wall I could to get his attention, before I lost the ability to stand completely and collapsed on my bed. He raced into the room within seconds.

“What’s wrong, Sophia?” What’s going on?” I clutched my head as the world continued to spin around me and a searing pain wrapped around my brain.
“Call an ambulance” I sobbed. “I think I’m going to die.”

At that moment, I felt my brain begin to shut down. When the paramedics arrived, I became violently ill, vomiting six times within six minutes and my blood glucose reading was sitting at 10.

“Am I going to die?” I sobbed into the bed. The blonde paramedic stroked my hand as she injected anti-nausea medication into my veins “Not if we can help it.”
As the darkness closed around me and I spun down into the depths of my damaged brain,
Christina Aguilera’s lilting voice came to me and sang, ‘Save me from myself.”

For the next 5 days, I suffered my stroke and ended up losing vision in my left eye temporarily. It was only then when I called an ambulance (again) and nearly collapsed, that a doctor took a chance on me and gave me an MRI of my brain. It was then they discovered I had suffered a cervical vertebral dissection, which is a fancy way of saying my major artery that runs along my neck tore, causing a clot to travel to my cerebellum and block blood flow otherwise known as an ischemic stroke. My doctors told me at that moment, I nearly didn’t make it.

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So why am I telling you my story?

Because to the outward eye, aside from walking like I’m drunk, you can’t tell I’ve had a stroke. I have no facial drooping, no slurred speech, no arm weakness and we almost didn’t call 000 in time. I don’t want you to make that mistake.

Here we are just seven short weeks later. What does my life look like now?

The road to recovery isn’t linear and as I’m sure you’ve heard many times, a brain injury is not like a broken bone. My first experience with this understanding was when I brazenly assumed I could just walk into any shopping centre like a normal person. After all, just a few short weeks prior, I was doing my grocery shopping entirely independently, chatting on my phone and enjoying life as a 30 year old woman. Brain injuries change that.

Within seconds of being exposed to the lights and sounds of Woolworths, I felt my brain beginning to shut down once again. My ears filled with a cacophony of screeching, my vision began to blur and my body started to sway at the sheer overwhelm of other people’s voices, the radio playing, the lights and the display of fruit in front of me. I was no longer in control of which direction my legs moved as my body veered me a sharp left into an aisle I had no intention of walking down. Within seconds I crashed into cans of vegetables and felt the hot tears spring to my eyes as other shoppers gave me strange, disparaging looks.

“I’m sorry” I wanted to say “I can’t help it. I have no control over this vehicle anymore.”

I like to describe my brain like I describe my car. Really efficient, safe and reliable until the brakes fail down a 110 kilometre highway in pouring rain. The sheer horror I face as a brain injury survivor is almost one of marvel at why my brain is betraying me. A tool that I felt I had so much control over is now an unregulated weapon and one I am trapped using everyday of my life.

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I have my good days and my bad days.

Good days look like being able to sit at my desk and do my beloved job for half a day, without the lights and sounds of the world to throw my brain off, going to physio for an hour, a little exercise, and on weekends, hanging out with my friends.

Bad days look like the room spinning as soon as I open my eyes, having the overwhelming urge to throw up, high blood pressure, hives, my ears ringing when I’m exposed to lights, noises and other people and calling triple 000 because I feel like I’m having another stroke.  

I used to love the sound of a busy café, but now it feels like my ears are on fire when the
waitress asks me for my order.

When friends ask me how I am, it feels like it takes every cell in my brain just to have a conversation before I’m too exhausted to function and my body starts to experience tremors.

If I’m stressed out, my body erupts in angry welt-like hives.

A normal afternoon would be having lunch at a sushi train. Now the sheer noise and movement of a busy cafe makes me feel like the world is closing in around me.

Some days, I wake up without sensation in my hands and arms and I walk into walls. Some days, I forget how to swallow.

I’ve made friends with more paramedics than I can count, but I’ve also had nurses say to me, “At least it wasn’t a real stroke.” because of the way I look.

Most days I lose my train of thought really quickly, repeat stories that people have already heard, lose my hearing in one or both ears and I forget simple things like eating breakfast.

When I wake up, the world is spinning, and when I go to sleep the world is still spinning. I have a constant fear that I’m going to go to sleep and not wake up.

Do you remember the scene where Alice falls down the rabbit hole? She tries brazenly to hold onto anything she can as the darkness consumes her and when she finally lands on the floor, she’s upside down. Well, if Disney had the rights to my stroke, they would have done it justice with that scene. The world feels upside down at times. There’s something incredibly peculiar about not knowing where you are in space. It’s like trying to walk with no gravity.

But outside of the physical symptoms, nothing prepares you for the changes to your personality. It happened gradually and at first I thought I was going mad.

Why didn’t I gain pleasure from watching my favourite movies anymore? It’s like I was watching the world from behind a dirty window.

Why was I so emotional all the time? I also struggled to please people as I always had before.

I had found my voice again and learned to say no when I didn’t feel comfortable. My therapist assured me this was indeed a good thing. “But I cry all the time now,” I wailed to her. “That’s good,” She laughed. “Because you never cried once in therapy before this.”

And on my darkest days, I hold onto the hope of tomorrow. I never thought the little things in life would mean so much to me, but they really do.

Strokes are more than a four letter acronym.”

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Written by Sophia Anna-Faria