‘I would have shot myself’
Stroke survivor Katrina Wheatley sings the praises of the new clot-removal procedure that saved her from disability.
Katrina Wheatley knew something was wrong – and what it was – when she woke around 4.45am on October 26, but the words wouldn’t come out right. “‘Oke! ‘Oke!” she told her husband.
“I was completely ‘out’ on one side. I had no feeling or movement on my right side but I had all my faculties; I was thinking ahead.”
Taken by an ambulance with sirens blaring to Auckland City Hospital, where she works as a nurse in the endoscopy suite, Wheatley, 71, was in the emergency department by 5.10am.
By 6.15, a catheter was inserted into her groin, and 20 minutes later, the blocked artery in her brain was open again. After two days of “terrible tiredness” and three days in hospital, she was almost back to where she’d been before the stroke.
When we speak to Wheatley two months later, she is anticipating her return to work in January, her only frustration slightly blurry vision when she squints to put on her eyeliner. And she’s noticed her formerly neat handwriting is “smaller and a bit scraggly”.
The stroke was a shock – she was fit and active, working four days a week and minding her grandchild on the fifth day, and was on no prescribed medicines.
If she’d been left disabled, “I think I would have shot myself. Having nursed people, I always said I never wanted a stroke. It’s not a life. This procedure is the most amazing, amazing thing in the world.”
The scans we’re publishing here are Wheatley’s.