Arlington Hts. firefighters feed the holiday spirit

Amanda Schauer and her fiance will be busy making the holiday rounds this weekend at family parties in Schaumburg, Buffalo Grove, St. Charles, McHenry and near DeKalb.

A pastry chef, the Lisle woman will be bringing homemade peppermint truffles to share with her relatives. But the real gift for them will be just to see her walking and talking. “A lot of people haven't seen me since this happened,” she said.

“This” refers to her eventful Labor Day. Schauer and her fiance, Mike Cortese, were just sitting down to lunch with her mother at the Lodge at Four Lakes in Lisle. Schauer ordered a soft drink.

“All of a sudden, I felt this weird, tingly feeling in my hand,” she recalled.

A migraine sufferer since she was 13, Schauer has experienced numbness in her left hand before. But that always came on gradually, and this was fast — really fast. She felt the tingling rush up her spine on her left side. “Something's not right,” she said, her speech slurred. She started slipping in her chair.

Mike caught her, laid her on the floor and called 911.

She was having a stroke, at the unlikely age of 24.

The ambulance took her to Edward Hospital in Naperville, where an emergency CT scan showed a large, 1.5-centimeter clot was cutting off the blood supply to the right side of her brain.

Two weeks later, Amanda would be back at work, and not too long after that, taking a rock climbing class — testament, as neurologists say, that “time is brain.”

The Edward ER staff called a “code stroke,” quickly assembling members of the stroke treatment team, including Dr. Jeffrey Miller, a neurointerventional surgeon and medical director of the Edward Neurosciences Institute. Amanda was whisked to the neurointerventional suite.

Miller, who is also an attending physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, explained to Schauer and her family the procedure she needed.

With Amanda under anesthesia, he threaded a guide catheter from her groin up into her neck, then a thin wire — just slightly larger in diameter than human hair — into her brain. The wire opens up at the end into a corkscrew shape for grabbing the clot. “Just like pulling a cork out of a bottle,” Miller said.

The clot was out in 15 minutes.

“The procedure was done at 3:30 in the afternoon; by 5:30, she was back to normal,” Miller said.

Schauer still had some weakness on her left side and a little trouble talking. But that cleared up by the following morning.

Without quick treatment, Miller said, “she would have ended up paralyzed.”

Amanda was fortunate in several respects. She got to Edward Hospital right away; most people wait three to five hours after developing stroke symptoms. She received timely, state-of-the-art treatment, before her brain suffered irreversible damage. And younger people tend to have softer clots and recover better, Miller said.

Strokes are rare, but not unheard of, in people Amanda's age or even younger. Miller has treated strokes in 10-year-olds.

In Schauer's case, doctors found that she has a type of heart defect known to cause strokes, as well as an aneurysm in her heart. She is under a cardiologist's care.

Outwardly at least, life is back to normal for Schauer. She works at Old Navy and is studying pastry-making and baking at the College of DuPage.

“I'm still mentally kind of recovering from it,” she said. “It was a huge shock. Physically, I'm fine. I started back at work two weeks after, and I actually took a rock climbing class with my fiance and we went rock climbing.”

But she still thinks about the stroke every day. “It's something you can't really not think about.”

Miller, who follows up closely with his patients, saw Amanda recently.

“She's doing great, and I'm hoping for some desserts,” Miller said. “Although I don't think I need them.”