Recovery from stroke takes unexpected journey

Four years ago, Whitefish resident Leslie Leroux opened her eyes and saw her family.

Looking up from her hospital bed, she noticed everyone crowded around her and wondered why she’d heard her sister yelling profanities in her ear.

Days earlier, Leroux had been admitted to Kalispell Regional Health Center after suffering eight strokes and undergoing open heart surgery. When she finally awoke Leroux was happy to find her family surrounding her, but confused because her strokes had taken her to an entirely new place.

“A lot of times when you think about a patient that’s suffering from a stroke, you kind of think that they’re gone,” she said during a speaking event in Whitefish earlier this month. “But I really wasn’t gone, I was floating in another place. It was completely painless, quiet and wonderful, and I couldn’t tell what size I was, I felt like a tiny molecule and as big as the universe all at once.”

Leroux shared her story recently alongside other healthcare professionals in a presentation called Faces of Stroke. The presentation focused on information on preventing, treating and surviving a stroke, as well as emphasizing how many people outside the victim are affected by the stroke.

Leroux offered her perspective on what it was like to suffer from eight strokes and recover. Stroke is a leading cause of long-term adult disability in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Kurt Lindsay, a vascular neurologist and the medical director for the stroke program at Kalispell Regional, said Leroux had a bacterial infection that starts in the bloodstream and causes a “vegetation” called emboli to form on the mitral valve of a heart. In Leroux’s case, that led to small pieces of emboli to come loose “showering” her brain’s circulation — causing multiple strokes throughout her brain.

“Cardiac disorders represent one of the most common causes of stroke,” Lindsay said. “And all stroke patients — especially young patients — need to have a thorough cardiac evaluation to rule out any abnormal heart rhythm or structural abnormality.”

The whole thing began when Leroux noticed a series of constant headaches that refused to go away. For five days the headaches tortured her, leaving her nearly incapacitated in bed before she finally deciding to call 911.

“It was like getting brain freeze when you eat ice cream, except that it was constant and increasing instead of getting better,” she said. “At one point I just really felt like I was dying, like it felt like I was literally leaving my body.”

At North Valley Hospital, doctors didn’t think Leroux was experiencing a stroke because her speech and motor skills seemed unaffected, though she said organizing thoughts while speaking had become difficult by that time. She was diagnosed with migraines, which she’d had since she was 16, and sent back home.

Just a few days later her condition had worsened. In the emergency room, she wasn’t very responsive and was sleepy. She showed confusion, facial droop and was not able to walk or speak — all signs of stroke. Leroux was taken to Kalispell Regional Medical Center for open heart surgery and huge doses of antibiotics for her bacterial infection. She spent a total of 13 days in the hospital before finally returning home.

Things didn’t get easier once she was released from the hospital, Leroux began a year-long endeavor to relearn all the things she’d once taken for granted, like the ability to walk or speak. Learning to walk required a literal step-by-step approach. On day one it was taking a few steps across the room, and from there she worked up to walking around the house and eventually around her neighborhood. Leroux said it took that entire year to feel comfortable holding conversations with people too.

Physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy are part of the rehabilitation process following stroke.

The biggest challenge, she said, was getting started each morning.

“I just remember waking up every day, wanting to just stay in bed and forcing myself out of bed, to take a shower and walk around the house and look at things and make sense of it,” she said.

Leroux credits word and sudoku puzzles with her fast recovery, as well as the first book she read after the strokes, “Stroke of Insight” by Jill Taylor.

Leroux doesn’t remember much from her time at the hospital, but she vividly recalls that “other place” she was in while she was being treated. In that place, there was no pain and none of the ordinary day-to-day problems we often worry about. And from that place, it was difficult to imagine returning to the real world, where she would return changed by the strokes.

“It was like another reality,” she said. “It was kind of hard to come back. It was so wonderful where I was, after days of feeling like I was dying, and then I opened my eyes and saw my family around me in the hospital bed, and I realized this is the world I really wanted to be in.”

For more about stroke treatment at Kalispell Regional Healthcare, visit https://www.krh.org/krmc/services/neuroscience-and-spine/stroke-program.