Quick Action and Quality Stroke Care
October 16, 2024
Judy Springer, 84, and her husband, Larry, awoke in the morning after a pleasant evening. Judy seemed to be feeling well when she went into the bathroom to prepare for the day. After some time went by, Larry became worried, as Judy had suffered a small stroke three weeks prior.
“I went to investigate and she was sitting there, almost unconscious with no life in her,” Larry recalls.
Larry wasted no time in calling 911 for help. An ambulance soon arrived and took them both to a nearby emergency room. Testing revealed that Judy was experiencing another stroke, this time potentially a big one due to a blocked major blood vessel inside of her head. She was soon on her way in another ambulance to Southwest Healthcare Temecula Valley Hospital to receive the advanced care she required.
Temecula Valley Hospital holds advanced certification through the DNV as a Comprehensive Stroke Center. In addition, U.S. News & World Report, the global authority in hospital rankings and consumer advice, named the hospital a 2024-2025 High Performing Hospital for Stroke.
Temecula Valley Hospital also earned the 2024 Women’s Choice Award® as one of America’s Best Hospitals for Stroke Care and holds distinction with the American Heart Association® as 2024 Get With The Guidelines Gold Plus®, Stroke Honor Roll Elite Plus® with Target: Type 2 Diabetes Honor Roll award status.
At the right place at the right time
When Larry and his daughter arrived at Temecula Valley Hospital, Judy was already in surgery with endovascular surgical neuroradiologist, Brian Cristiano, MD DABR®.
“Using the Viz.ai® secure application on his cell phone, Dr. Cristiano showed my daughter and me a diagram of the problem that Judy had,” Larry says. “It was very distinct and very understandable that there were a lot of vessels in her brain. She had had a blood clot in her brain and it was very large.”
Viz.ai is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, to help physicians triage stroke patients. This advanced secure technology analyzes brain imaging and connects stroke care teams to help quickly and efficiently diagnose stroke patients, as well as determine the best possible treatment.
Judy was in the process of experiencing a large stroke caused by a blood clot that had traveled to her head and was blocking circulation to a large part of her brain. Her symptoms included severe expressive aphasia, or inability to speak, and hemiplegia, the inability to move part of the body.
“I received a consultation request from the emergency physician treating Judy at the other hospital, and was able to immediately review the imaging studied there using the secure Viz.ai app,” Dr. Cristiano explains. “I saw that she had occlusive blood clots in two places that were causing her symptoms. I was also able to see that there was limited permanent damage to the brain, which made her a good candidate for mechanical thrombectomy.”
Quick action when minutes mattered
Dr. Cristiano immediately brought Judy into the neuroangiography suite to perform a mechanical thrombectomy. “The suite is a specially equipped operating room environment prepared with advanced imaging technologies and equipment,” he explains. “The staff includes specially trained nurses, radiologic technologists and anesthesiologists to immediately provide medical treatment, stabilization and endovascular therapy for acute neurological conditions, including acute ischemic stroke.”
In this case, Judy needed a mechanical thrombectomy. This minimally invasive procedure uses an advanced catheter and other devices that are inserted through the large artery near the top of the leg, the common femoral artery. The goal is to remove blood clots from the brain circulation and restore normal blood flow.
Within minutes of arrival at Temecula Valley Hospital, Judy was under anesthesia and the procedure was underway. Within 26 minutes of starting the procedure, blood flow was safely restored to Judy’s brain by aspiration thrombectomy at two separate and distinct intracranial occlusion sites.
“She was admitted to our intensive care unit and recovered quickly to her prior level of functioning,” says Dr. Cristiano. Judy was discharged just two days later.
After Judy’s surgery was complete, when Dr. Cristiano told Larry that he was able to stop the progression of his wife’s stroke, Larry was in awe and beyond grateful.
“That was a moment. You could have knocked me over with a feather and I couldn’t believe what an amazing doctor Dr. Cristiano is,” Larry recalls. “We had somebody that could do something that difficult and get the results. We could only think about how much could we thank him for something like that. It was just an amazing thing that he did for us.”