When we’re young, it’s not hard to get the feeling that we’re more or less invincible. While this doesn’t mean we think nothing will happen to us if we suddenly cross a busy highway, it does mean that we might not appreciate how fragile our health can be.
While we might take some risks while sowing our wild oats, the scary and unfair part of life is that the biggest problems can sometimes start with the smallest, most innocent-seeming actions.
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23-year-old Natalie Kunicki is a paramedic for the London Ambulance Service.
But even with that background, it was difficult to recognize some worrying symptoms that developed one night after she had been out with a friend.
While watching a movie in bed, she happened to stretch her neck a certain way that produced some cracking noises.
As The Daily Mail reported , she and her friend certainly noticed the crack, but neither of them thought much of it until she got up to use the bathroom 15 minutes later.
As she moved, she noticed she was swaying a lot. When she looked down, she saw that her left leg wasn’t moving at all before she fell to the ground.
At first, she just figured she had too much to drink. As she thought of it further, she wondered if she had been drugged with something that might have caused paralysis.
This made her embarrassed to call for help, but she finally did after trying to sleep it off.
When the paramedics arrived, they administered some tests and found that Kunicki’s heart rate and blood pressure were “sky high.”
As she told The Daily Mail , “I think they did look at me at first like they thought I was just a classic drunk 23-year-old but I told them I was a paramedic and I knew something was wrong.”
When she made it to University College London Hospital, she learned that she had experienced a stroke.
As she said, ‘I don’t smoke, I don’t really drink and I don’t have any family history of strokes so it’s quite strange it happened to me when I was just moving in bed.”
As doctors would learn, that movement had somehow ruptured her vertebral artery.
This is the most common way that young people experience strokes.
The specific way that Kunicki had done it, however, was described as “one in a million.”
Although surgeons repaired the artery with a stent, they couldn’t clear the resulting brain clot and Kunicki was left almost completely paralyzed in her left side.
As she put it, “At the start I couldn’t move my thumb and forefinger. I could kind of move my wrist up and down. I couldn’t lift my arm. I could bend my left leg but I couldn’t wiggle my toes.”
This news left her depressed and appearing “emotionless.”
She told her consultant “you should have killed me” during a check-in.
As she said, “Depression is really common after a stroke because you lose so much of your independence and your dignity.”
Luckily, she had supportive friends and family to help her through.
“I was able to have my little pity party for a week but that’s it,” she said to The Mirror , “They were fantastic and they would come in and do all the exercises with me. I think if I didn’t have them I would have been in my pity party quite a bit longer but instead I smashed through all the therapy goals.”
Doctors said that this brain clot should clear in time and with daily physical exercises, she regained some feeling and movement.
In particular, she’s recovered movement in her arm, leg and hand. She can walk, but only for about five minutes at a time.
“I’m really clumsy. I can’t do up buttons, I find it too difficult. I can feel hot and cold now but I still feel a bit numb.”
Although doctors can’t give her a specific time-frame, she’s hoping to return to work for “light duty” within six to 12 months.
Now Natalie is using her circumstances to warn people of the risks when cracking joints.
“People need to know that even if you’re young, something this simple can cause a stroke,” she explains, “I wasn’t even trying to crack my neck. I just moved and it happened.”
“Every minute more of your brain cells are dying, so don’t ever discount a stroke just because someone is young”
She explains that though she’s a paramedic, she didn’t call an ambulance for at least 10 minutes because she thought a stroke was too unlikely.
“I should have known much better.”
Although she’s determined to get back to work, she’s already had to make some difficult choices.
She’s had to give up her apartment and move back in with her parents while she recovers and may have to return to her native Australia in July.
Even so, her brother, Michael has set up a GoFundMe page for her, which has already raised the equivalent of $5,954.58 in one month.
She said, “Eighty per cent of the donations are from people I work with which means so much.”
h/t: The Daily Mail
