STROKE RESULTS IN RARE CHANGE IN SURVIVOR’S SPEECH: A FOREIGN ACCENT
Most people Pamela Anderson Bowen meets wonder about her accent. Sometimes they try to guess the origin. Maybe Russia? What about Sweden?
“I’m from here,” the North Carolina resident will answer. Then she waits for the inevitable follow-up question about where she grew up and developed the unusual lilt in her voice.
Pam has lived in North Carolina most of her life, except for a few years in Michigan for work. It was the accent itself that arrived nearly a decade ago.
In 2012, Pam was in the shower. When she went to turn off the knob with her right hand, she couldn’t move her arm. She felt the muscles on the right side of her face droop and she couldn’t speak. Pam, then 58, knew she was having a stroke.
Her husband, Larry, happened to walk into the bathroom around the same time. Seeing the panicked look on her face, he ran to help her.
At the hospital in nearby Winston-Salem, doctors discovered Pam indeed had a stroke — and she’d had two others previously. All were caused by something called antiphospholipid antibody syndrome. Her immune system mistakenly created antibodies that made her blood much more likely to clot. Since that diagnosis a year earlier, Pam had been taking an aspirin daily to prevent clotting.
In her case, doctors said, the clot likely created by her condition traveled through an undiscovered hole in her heart.
She was released from the hospital within three days. By then, Pam had regained feeling in her arm but needed physical and occupational therapy to improve her grip and to relearn things such as eating and brushing her teeth.
Her speech went from slurred back to clear before she left the hospital. But when she started speaking again, sometimes she sounded like herself. At other times she sounded like she came from another country.
Pam was diagnosed with
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