May 11 started as a seemingly normal Saturday morning for the Verdures in their Bolivia, North Carolina, home. Lisa Verdure was awake and brewing coffee at 6:30, while her husband, Michel, and their dog continued to slumber. Moments later, Michel shuffled into the room.
When he opened his mouth to talk, gibberish came out. His left arm hung limp at his side. Confused, Lisa focused on Michel’s face and saw the left side of his face sag.
Lisa recognized three signs that Michel was suffering from a stroke: speech difficulty, immobility on the left side of his body and drooping on one side of the face. She knew time was critical.
Acting quickly, Lisa asked Michel to lie down on the couch before she called 911. But Michel tried to bat the phone out of her hands.
“I didn’t know anything was wrong with me,” he said.
EMTs transported Michel to Novant Health New Hanover Regional Medical Center, a certified comprehensive stroke center about 30 minutes away in Wilmington. He remembers the EMT telling him, “They are specialized in strokes.” And from then on, Michel said, “The stars were aligned.”
Award-winning stroke care.
A comprehensive stroke team at the ready
When Michel arrived at the hospital, the stroke team was waiting for him and immediately took him in for a CT scan.
While he was aware of what was happening, his speech was still garbled, and the left side of his body was limp. The scan revealed a blood clot in the distal M2 segment of Michel’s middle cerebral artery. Neurosurgeon Dr. Justin Cappuzzo explained this location is like a “little country side road” if you look at a map of the brain.
Michel was wheeled to the neurology institute’s angiography suite, filled with sophisticated equipment to help Cappuzzo remove the clot through a thrombectomy. Thrombectomy, a minimally invasive procedure that allows a neurosurgeon to suction the clot out of the brain without opening the skull, has existed for about 20 years. However, the procedure has traditionally been limited to main blood vessels that are wide enough to accommodate a catheter, the suction tube. Recent advancements allow Cappuzzo and the rest of the neurosurgery team to remove clots causing ischemic strokes even in slender blood vessels – the little country side roads of the brain.
For the thrombectomy, Capuzzo inserted a thin wire and catheter into Michel’s right wrist, then traveled through the blood vessels to reach and remove the clot. Within just 15 minutes, the procedure was complete. Cappuzzo watched as Michel made a total recovery right there on the surgical table. His speech and mobility returned almost instantaneously.