I heard medics preparing to turn off life support machine
Mother’s living nightmare after stroke – and her painstaking recovery
IMAGINE ‘screaming’ at doctors not to turn off your life-support machine but nobody being able to hear you?
That was the terrifying nightmare mum Adele Rudd found herself in, aged just 25 and with an eight-monthold baby.
She was in a coma and given only a five per cent chance of survival after a rare brain stem stroke.
Thankfully, her dad Anthony stayed by her side and asked her to ‘kick a ball for baby Milano’ and she moved her right foot. To medics’ amazement, she woke up.
But she was paralysed from the neck down and could only communicate with her eyes. Today, thanks to her grit and determination, the support of her family and the remarkable therapists at Moseley Hall Hospital, Adele has managed to start walking and talking again.
The first time Adele realised anything was wrong was when she was driving home from a friend’s house, and she began to feel hot and tingly. Her vision went blurry so she immediately pulled over.
“My whole body went numb, I reached for my phone but had no grip in my hand,” said Adele. “I was dripping with sweat. A passerby asked if I was OK, but I couldn’t get my words out and she quickly called 999. All I was thinking about was my baby son next to me.
“I could hear an ambulance siren and, next, out of nowhere, my dad pulled up in his van. By total coincidence, he was on his way home from work early, noticed my car and thought I’d maybe been involved in a minor bump – someone was watching over me that day!”
Adele was rushed to Heartlands Hospital and then to Good Hope. An MRI showed two blockages in the blood supply to her brain.
She had suffered a series of TIAs – mini strokes – and then, on her second day in hospital, suffered a further, much bigger stroke. Doctors told my family to say ‘goodbye’ and to allow them to switch my life support machines off as they said there was no brain activity and I was clinically brain dead,” she said. “But this wasn’t true. I was aware of most things being said, I could hear but couldn’t wake.
“It was like a deep sleep. It’s like being trapped inside your body, screaming out, but there was absolutely nothing you could do about it. I couldn’t speak or move, I could only communicate with my eyes.
“My dad spent every second of every day with me, proving the doctors wrong. I knew he was there and that he wouldn’t have ever left me.
“I remember him telling me, if I was there, to kick the ball to my son – and I moved my right foot. It was a miracle – there was brain activity, and my little son was my reason to fight.
“There was never any doubt in my mind I was ever going to leave him.”
After two weeks in a coma, Adele woke up but she had locked-in syndrome and could only blink once for ‘yes’ and twice for ‘no’. “It felt like I was in a nightmare, I felt like ‘who was this person?’ said Adele.
Four months of physio and speech therapy as an inpatient at Moseley Hall Hospital’s INRU neurological rehabilitation unit led to her defying the odds to walk and talk again. Staff did all they could to help Adele emotionally as well as physically. Having first been rushed into hospital on March 9, 2016, Adele was both excited and nervous to finally be able to come home on September 21 – seven months after first going into hospital.
“Coming home felt like I was dreaming,” said the single mum, who used to work as a learning disabilities support worker.
“My dad had spent seven months adapting the house and building an amazing extension downstairs and bathroom for me. I didn’t recognise the house.
“To this day, no-one knows the cause. It was put down to trauma to my neck – a few weeks earlier I had had a bump in my car which made my neck jolt forward suddenly.
“I had a month or so of continuous headaches and stiffness in my neck but it was put down to sleeping funny and getting a crick neck.”
It was like a deep sleep. It’s like being trapped inside your body, screaming out, but there was absolutely nothing you could do about it. Adele Rudd