Pregnant mum paralysed while tidying up house
A MUM has been left paralysed from the waist down after suffering a rare spinal stroke when she was nine weeks pregnant.
Ashleigh Turner, 26, from Thorney Close, Sunderland, was tidying up on Boxing Day last year when she suddenly felt ‘intense pins and needles’ in her body. Just 20 minutes later, she couldn’t feel anything at all.
She was rushed to Sunderland Royal Hospital and was later transferred to Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary (RVI) where doctors discovered she had suffered a spinal stroke, which is so rare they account for just 1.25% of all strokes.
The pregnant mum spent seven months in hospital and carried out months of physiotherapy to try to improve her mobility.
She was discharged at the end of July after giving birth to her baby boy Jacob Joyce, but Ashleigh and her partner Stephen Joyce, 26, have been told the paralysis is likely to be permanent.
Recalling the day of her stroke, Ashleigh, who worked as a sales assistant at Flying Tiger, said: “I was tidying up from Christmas and I just picked up a suitcase to move it out of the way and that’s when it happened.
“My arms just went and I had really intense pins and needles that just spread through my body.
“I managed to call Stephen, my brother and an ambulance. I felt this sudden rush through my body and my legs and everything just went, I couldn’t move.
“I’m just glad there at the time.
“I had quite a lot of back and neck pain, it started a few weeks before.
“The doctors weren’t really sure what was wrong because it’s that rare.
“It was quite a challenge for Sunderland because I was their first stroke patient that was pregnant.”
Ashleigh has no movement below her waist and, although she can move her arms and wrists, she doesn’t have control of her fingers and hands.
The paralysis has had a devastating effect on the family with Ashleigh unable to be as hands-on as she would like to be with her children, Paige, Luca, and Jacob, who is seven weeks old.
They’ve also had to cancel their wedding and put their plans on hold.
She said: “It’s quite hard to do anything with the kids, my daughter is seven and very much likes to be out doing stuff, and Luca, who is two, likes to be out too.
“We were meant
the
to
kids
weren’t
get married
next year but that had to be cancelled. Stephen had to leave his job and I’m not going back to work.
“We had everything planned, we were going to have a baby and then get married but that’s all changed now.
“Jacob is our miracle baby. It’s hard because I can’t do a lot with him, I just get to pinch the cuddles.”
Her partner Stephen has had to quit his job to care for Ashleigh who now needs round-the-clock care.
He said: “I remember I was in work when I got a phone call to say: ‘I can’t move from the neck down’. She sounded so scared.
“It happened over the course of 20 minutes. She had really bad pins and needles going through her body and she felt it going down from her neck.
“She was nine weeks pregnant so I thought about miscarriages and I was thinking that something was wrong with the baby, it was really scary but luckily everything was fine.
“The staff at Sunderland were just amazing though, they were really good and with Ashleigh being pregnant they obviously couldn’t give her certain things.”
Although the family receives carers’ allowance each week, Ashleigh and Stephen are struggling to make ends meet and pay for the expensive equipment required, which includes a hoist for the bathroom and a double orthopaedic bed.
Friend Keira Ramshaw, captain of Sunderland AFC Ladies, has set up a Gofundme page in a bid to raise some money to help. So far, over £1,400 has been donated to support Ashleigh.