‘Attack of migraine’ at 18 was actually a stroke
WHEN she suddenly lost the ability to find the right word and her speech became slurred, Millie Carrington put her problems down to a particularly bad migraine.
Even after the side of her face dropped, she did not realise she had suffered a stroke – after all, she was then only 18.
She ignored her symptoms, which included a weakness on her left side, for two days because of the common assumption that strokes only happen in elderly people.
She even set off on a summer holiday to Guernsey with her family before realising something was badly wrong.
After her worried father took her to A&E, a scan revealed the true cause of her symptoms.
Doctors discovered a previously undiagnosed hole in her heart, which had triggered the stroke without warning. Miss Carrington had to undergo surgery to seal the hole and spent almost a year in speech therapy.
Incredibly, she has made a full recovery, regaining her speech and even managing to learn a new language, Spanish, which she is now studying at Edinburgh University along with history of art.
Describing how she fell ill in July 2013, she said: ‘I was at work when I felt my face dropping on the left side – only for a couple of minutes. I couldn’t really speak, I couldn’t get sentences together properly and my eyesight was blurry.
‘I thought I was having a really bad migraine, which I do suffer from. When I have them, I just go to sleep until they wear off, so that’s what I did.’ She said it was ‘very scary’ to find that she had suffered a stroke. ‘I remember a doctor came into the room, pointed at his stethoscope and said, “What’s this?” I said it was a thermometer,’ said Miss Carrington.
‘He pointed at a glass of water and I said it was a jug of water. I was clearly in the right area in my brain, but I just could not find the right word.’
Weeks later, she was supposed to move to Edinburgh from her family home in Harrogate, Yorkshire, to start her studies at university.
Instead she had to defer for a year and found herself at home, sleeping for hours every day and working as hard as she could with a speech therapist.
‘I found it very difficult to understand what had happened,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it would take me up to two minutes to find the right word. I was often in tears, it was a very traumatic event I had gone through.’
But after overcoming her difficulties, she is speaking out to warn other people her age of the symptoms to look out for, having done fundraising work to raise aware- ness for the Stroke Association. Andrea Cail, Scottish director of the charity, said: ‘Although most strokes happen to older people, one in four strokes in the UK occurs in people under 65 years old – including children and babies.’
Miss Carrington – now 20 and in her second year at university – added: ‘I just want to tell other people my age, if they see any symptoms that could give them any doubts, to go to hospital right away. The first three hours after a stroke are crucial.’
‘It was very traumatic’