When Tulsa news anchor Julie Chin reported to work Saturday, she “felt great. ” But during the broadcast, she began stumbling over words and ended up cutting her segment short. “I’m sorry, something is going on with me this morning, and I apologize to everybody,” Chin, an Emmy-award winning journalist and meteorologist at KJRH, said on air before tossing the newscast to her meteorologist colleague.
The next day, Chin revealed on Facebook that doctors think she’d suffered “the beginnings of a stroke. ” “The episode seemed to have come out of nowhere,” she wrote, describing how she lost partial vision in one eye before her hand and arm went numb. “Then, I knew I was in big trouble when my mouth would not speak the words that were right in front of me on the teleprompter,” Chin continued.
“If you were watching Saturday morning, you know how desperately I tried to steer the show forward, but the words just wouldn’t come. ” Chin thanked her colleagues for quickly calling 911, and “the emergency responders and medical professionals who have shared their expertise, hearts, and smiles with me. ” She said she’s been undergoing testing, which have “all come back great.
” “At this point, Doctors think I had the beginnings of a stroke, but not a full stroke,” she wrote. “There are still lots of questions, and lots to follow up on, but the bottom line is I should be just fine. ” She said she should return to work in a few days.
Chin added that she’s learned that stroke signs aren’t always obvious, and encouraged viewers to be aware of the symptoms using the acronym BE FAST: loss of balance, eye changes, facial drooping, arm numbness, speech difficulty, time to call 911. Strokes occur when there’s a disruption of blood flow to the brain, typically either from a clot that’s traveled to the brain or from spontaneous brain bleeding. How a stroke is treated depends on how big it is, where it is, and what kind it is.
A clot may be treated with a clot-busting medication, removed via surgery, or passes on its own. A stroke caused by brain bleeding could be stopped by reversing any blood-thinning medications or by inserting a coil into the affected blood vessel, American Heart Association president Dr. Donald M.
Lloyd-Jones previously told Insider . How quickly patients get treatment affects the severity and length of any complications that follow , which can include UTIs, pneumonia, paralysis, speech and swallowing difficulties , memory loss, and even personality changes and a propensity for profanity . Women are more likely to have, and die from, strokes, according the AHA.
About 10% of them occur in people younger than 50 , and the risk goes down the younger you are, Lloyd-Jones said. Both doctors and patients can overlook the symptoms in younger, apparently healthy people. Jayme Kelly, a 29-year-old nurse and CrossFit enthusiast , previously told Insider she thought her numbness was due to sleeping on her limbs wrong.
But just a few hours later, she couldn’t speak. At the hospital, she learned she’d suffered a stroke related to a blood-clotting disorder that had gone undiagnosed. She said she wants people, and especially women, to put their health first.
“Sometimes we need to focus on ourselves more and then we can focus on everyone else,” she said. “And if I can have a stroke, so can all of you. “.
From: insider
URL: https://www.insider.com/news-anchor-had-beginnings-of-stroke-on-tv-warns-signs-2022-9
