A few weeks back, we brought you the story of the Englishwoman who was fined by her town council after having months of crushing sex with her boyfriend that kept the neighbors up. Now we have a much less funny version for you...
According to CBS News, a woman in Illinois suffered a stroke at the age of 35 after having an orgasm...
"This young woman ... while having intercourse had numbness on the left
side of her face, slurred speech, and weakness in her left arm," Biller
tells WebMD. "When she was transferred to our care six hours after
onset, she was completely unable to move her left arm, her face was
paralyzed, her speech was garbled, and she was in a state of panic."
Forgive us for saying something so obvious, but having a stroke sucks. We've watched it happen to someone we knew in a nursing home and have had nightmares about it ever since. What's even worse about this story is that in order to save her life, doctors were forced to run
a catheter from an artery in the woman's groin up into her brain to find the blood clot by angiography.
There's a happy ending to all this, thank your respective higher power (or whatnot.) The procedure reversed most of the effects of the stroke, even though it had been much longer than the three hours generally required from clot-killing drug tPA to work, and today
she is well, with only an almost imperceptible fold
in the skin under her nose and slight loss of dexterity in her left
hand.
Phew. And what, CBS, can we learn from this episode:
She shared one thing in common with six other young people who suffered
sex-related strokes: a small opening in the wall between the two upper
chambers of her heart.
One in four adults has this minor heart defect, called a patent
foramen ovale or PFO. A PFO allows some blood to flow from the right
side of the heart to the left side. This blood bypasses the lung and
goes straight to the brain.
Most people with a PFO have no symptoms and don't know they have it.
Also, for a person to have a stroke during orgam, they must have a blod clot. Luckily for all of us, this is a rare occurence, but if you experience these kinds of symptoms, take your ass to the ER, insured or un-.
Via CBS News.
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