How a stroke brought new urgency to scientist’s work
Xiaohui Zha was in Baltimore watching one of her students make a presentation when she suddenly lost hearing in one ear and then felt a strange surge from one side of her head to the other.
The senior scientist with The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and associate professor at the University of Ottawa did not want to interrupt the presentation, so she walked carefully across the front of the room and into a hallway where she promptly collapsed.
Zha, who leads crucial research into the properties of cholesterol, had suffered a devastating hemorrhagic stroke caused by a sudden brain bleed. Minutes after she calmly sat watching her student speak, her life hung in the balance.
Doctors at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital quickly diagnosed her condition and began surgery to insert a coil that would stop the bleeding. Although the catastrophic stroke, which happened about two years ago, occurred while she was far from home, it was the “Ottawa criteria” for diagnosing the type of brain bleed she had that helped save her by enabling such a quick diagnosis.
The following days would tell whether she would survive. Ruptured brain aneurysms, which cause hemorrhagic strokes, are fatal in up to 50 per cent of cases. The risk remains high for five to 10 days after the rupture.
Zha was lucky. She recovered and was able to continue her research, albeit with a bigger delay for recovery than she would have liked. She recalls when she first tried to walk after her stroke and how difficult it was.
“I had to relearn all my movements.”
But soon her “pathologically” positive thinking took over. She realized how lucky she was.
“A large proportion of people have disability. I didn’t have any.”
And she realized how much she wanted to achieve. Zha said she always believed she could achieve great things, but was never in a hurry. The stroke changed that.
“You feel an urgency, you are not leaning back anymore, because there might not be any next day. You never know what is around the corner. It reminds you how fragile life is.”
There was plenty to overcome first, despite the urgency.
When Zha tried to return to her lab, she was told it was too soon, that she could not return to work until she completed rehabilitation.
She put off her return reluctantly, but continued meeting with her team of students and researchers, by Skype or at her home, so the work continued.
And to speed up her recovery, she played video games, took up knitting, even threw herself into house cleaning, viewing it as part of her therapy and a way to keep busy and improve her mood.
It worked. More than a year after the stroke, she returned to work.
Zha’s work looks at all aspects of cholesterol to better understand its properties.
“Cellular cholesterol is under stringent regulation,” she says. “Disturbances to this regulation are the direct causes of numerous human disorders,” including coronary heart disease.
Zha, who will be awarded The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute’s Chrétien Researcher of the Year Award Saturday, said she has plenty of ideas she wants to research further “to see if they are right.
“I always believed I would get there, but what was the hurry? I must try now because I may not have the chance to try again.”