It was December 15, 2022. I was visiting my 92-year-old grandmother at a nursing home. My family was taking shifts sitting with her because she had broken her hip. I had just found out that I was pregnant two or three days before. I had a 10-year-old daughter at the time, so this was a surprise baby. I went to get a nurse for my nonna, and as I walked out into the hallway, I lost control of the left side of my body. I held on to a rail with my right hand, and I just kind of twirled down to the floor.

The staff could immediately see that I was showing signs of a stroke, and they immediately called the paramedics, who were able to get me in the ambulance and over to Hoag in Newport Beach. They rushed me into the ER, and the neurologist there, Dr. Jason Muir, evaluated me, got me into interventional radiology (IR) right away. I remember the nurses telling me that I was so lucky because I got to have both Dr. Christopher Baker and Dr. Alexander Misono on my case. They don’t frequently work together, but they’re both amazing. And the nurses said they listen to really good music in the IR. The anesthesiologist explained that there was a risk to my baby because I was only seven weeks pregnant, but, you know, we had to do this. And next thing I knew, I was awake, and I’m pretty sure it was Dr. Misono standing over me. And I said, “So what did we listen to?” And he laughed. He was like, “We didn’t have time for music!” It was 45 minutes from the time I got through that door until they removed the clot in my brain.

It was a massive stroke on the right side of my brain, in the middle cerebral artery. It’s just absolutely certain that if it had been in there longer, I wouldn’t be here, or I would be significantly impaired. Immediately after the surgery, I had no deficits whatsoever. They, of course, were running other tests while I was recovering in the ICU, and they were watching my heart, and that’s how they detected that I actually had a PFO, a patent foramen ovale, in my heart. Everyone is born with these little flaps that open and close and allow the blood to pass through when you’re in utero. For most people, it closes within something like an hour of birth. But mine never closed.