Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy arrived

 The first major stroke caused by CAA

One night two years later, my husband was acting sort of strange. He was very quiet. Didn’t say a lot. I asked if he was Ok. I even asked if he was annoyed with me. He said no but didn’t say a lot else. He was due to go out that night to see a film with some friends which he did (driving half and hour there and half an hour back). When he returned home he seemed OK. The next day he just didn’t seem to be himself. Still quiet, said he had a bit of a headache and was tired but that he was OK. I had a funeral to attend some distance from home (I needed to go and there was not enough to make me think I should stay) but I just felt in my gut that something was not right.

I rang him a couple of hours later, he was not making any sense in his speech and I could not understand what he was trying to tell me. He also sounded very confused. I immediately thought that he’d had a stroke, I called a family member who lived locally who went around to see him, she rang an ambulance and he was taken to Accident and Emergency.

Cutting a long story short (which is always a good thing to do), a CT scan showed that he’d had a major haemorrhagic stroke (that had started the day before, and about the size of a golf ball) in his left frontal lobe, hence the difficulty speaking and understanding language (expressive and receptive dysphasia to be specific) and some memory and behavioural changes.

He was transferred immediately to a specialist stroke unit at one of our major teaching hospitals. Many scans and tests later over night and I fronted up to the ward round the next morning waiting to hear the news. I knew immediately what the medical team would be saying (the sword of Damocles had finally arrived). The very lovely director of the stroke unit spoke to me first on the side and asked if I understood what had happened and I said that I assumed that this was all as a result of Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy which he both confirmed and I think was relieved that I had an understanding to some degree of this condition. Our journey had begun in earnest and we could no longer put our head in the sand and pretend that this wasn't happening.

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