Weight Loss – How these changings make’s you healthy

Weight Loss – How these changings make’s you healthy
healthy-life-styles
As Diana Hardeman climbed into a New York City taxi with her boyfriend around midnight on May 31, she suddenly realized she had no idea where to tell the driver to go.
The 33-year-old knew she had to get to a hospital – and fast. Hardeman was fairly sure she had just had a stroke, her second in less than three years. But she had never asked the neurologist she had seen after the first stroke where she should head in the event of a recurrence.

Rattled, she opted for the only place she could think of: a large public hospital not far from her apartment.

Hardeman emerged from her two-day stay with more questions than answers. Doctors could not determine why the otherwise healthy and unusually fit young woman with no apparent risk factors – a devotee of yoga, strenuous hikes and marathons – had suffered strokes in the first place.

Hardeman, who owns MilkMade, an artisanal ice cream company in Brooklyn, decided that her life depended on an answer. So far, she had suffered no permanent impairment. Next time, she knew, she might not be so lucky.

So she temporarily shuttered her burgeoning business and plunged into an unfamiliar world. Guided by her father, a doctor who specializes in critical care, Hardeman plowed through dense articles in medical journals, sought out a variety of experts and amassed and organized a growing stack of medical records.

In her case there were options, not absolutes. Ultimately it was up to Hardeman, who has an MBA degree, to weigh the conflicting advice of experts and decide what to do.

“I had to become the CEO of my own health,” she said.

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A few days before Christmas in 2013, Hardeman flew to southern California for the holidays. She spent the morning of Dec. 22 surfing with her father. As she bent down to slather coconut oil on her legs after a shower, Hardeman suddenly felt profoundly weak. Her right arm went numb.

Unsure of what was happening, she walked out of the bathroom, sat on the floor of her bedroom and spoke to her boyfriend. “Only gibberish came out,” she said.

“At first I thought, ‘Am I dying?’ ” she recalled, as she discovered that the right side of her body was paralyzed. Hardeman’s boyfriend telephoned her father, who had just left the house. He immediately returned and called an ambulance. Within 20 minutes, Hardeman, whose speech by then had returned to normal, was in the emergency room of the hospital where her father works. Forty-five minutes later, she received tPA, a drug used to treat ischemic strokes (those caused by a blood clot rather than a ruptured blood vessel in the brain), which must be administered within about three hours of an event.

“I was very lucky I was at my dad’s hospital, which is a stroke center,” she said, referring to institutions specially certified to treat acute strokes.

Hardeman was discharged on Christmas Day. Most of the feeling on her right side had returned, but some weakness lingered for several weeks.
Doctors had ruled out common causes of a stroke, including deep vein thrombosis, a blood clot that often forms in the legs. They discovered that Hardeman had a common heart defect called a PFO, or patent foramen ovale, a small hole in the wall between the two top chambers of the heart. The hole, present during fetal development, is supposed to close after birth, but sometimes doesn’t. The condition is shared by an estimated 20 to 30 percent of the population and rarely causes problems; most people are unaware of it.

Tests also revealed that Hardeman had actually suffered two small strokes in different parts of the brain. Doctors decided that they appeared to be the result of a tiny tear in her left carotid artery, which supplies blood to the brain.

These tears can occur as a result of physical activity as the neck is hyperextended. Yoga, surfing, chiropractic manipulation or even having one’s hair washed at a salon (dubbed “the beauty parlor stroke”) are known to cause such tears.

Hardeman thought she might have suffered a tear as a result of her contorted position on a cramped cross-country flight several days earlier. She said she had awakened from a nap to find her head tilted to the left at an odd angle.

Doctors advised Hardeman to take aspirin and a blood thinner to prevent another stroke and to avoid exercise, including yoga, until further notice.

Back in New York, she consulted a neurologist, who advised her to continue taking medication. After a scan in February revealed nothing amiss involving her carotid artery, the neurologist cleared her to resume running and yoga. Within a few months, Hardeman said, she “felt great.”

She continued taking a daily low-dose aspirin as a precaution. After three months on a blood thinner, she was told she no longer needed it.

“I felt very grateful about how this had all turned out,” she said. The ice cream business she had started in her apartment several years earlier was flourishing. “I thought, ‘Well, this was just a fluke.’ I had gotten over the trepidation that this would happen again.”