Stroke During Yoga | Abigail Atkinson

Abigail Atkinson was teaching yoga when she started to notice the symptoms of a vertebral artery dissection that caused a stroke.

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Highlights:

02:33 Introduction
04:51 Knowing when to follow your instincts
10:51 The ability to listen to your body
16:19 Getting back to yoga after the stroke
21:42 The advantage of having years of yoga practice
27:46 Having yoga snacks throughout the day
30:34 The neurovision therapy program
38:44 What is the next step?
41:07 The importance of emotional healing
47:00 Post-traumatic growth
53:59 Lack of stroke support information
57:26 The hardest thing about stroke
59:46 What has stroke taught you?
1:00:39 A message to other stroke survivors

Transcript:

Abigail Atkinson 0:00
Having a disciplined yoga practice for as long as I did helped me, I already was in the habit of sticking to a daily discipline. So I follow through on my physical and occupational therapy. I found that when I did what I call little yoga snacks, I would take the yoga snacks where I would do some of my therapy stuff.

Abigail Atkinson 0:24
And I would go for like five or 10 minutes and then rest and then I would do that several times a day. So I focused on frequency more than just a big long duration. When I kind of switched to that strategy I’ve made significantly faster improvements. But part of that was showing up every single day and working hard.

Intro 0:48
This is the Recovery after Stroke podcast. With Bill Gasiamis, helping you navigate recovery after stroke.

Bill Gasiamis 1:02
Hello, and welcome to the Recovery after Stroke Podcast. I’m putting the final touches on my book and have made the first chapter available for free for anyone curious to check it out and wants to grab a copy.

Bill Gasiamis 1:15
If you go to recoveryafterstroke.com/book and fill out the form, you will receive the free chapter in your email a few moments later. The book is called The Unexpected Way That A Stroke Became The Best Thing That Happened.

Bill Gasiamis 1:29
I am coming to the end of this project which started as a concept four years ago. So go to recoveryafterstroke.com/book and grab your PDF of the first chapter free today. If you are a stroke survivor with a story to share about your experience. Now is the perfect time to join me on the show. The interviews are not scripted, you do not have to plan for them.

Bill Gasiamis 1:51
All you need to do to qualify is be a stroke survivor who wants to share your story in the hope that it will help somebody else who’s going through something similar. If you’re a researcher who wants to share the findings of a recent study, or you’re looking to recruit people into studies, you may also wish to reach out and be a guest on my show.

Bill Gasiamis 2:12
If you have a commercial product that you would like to promote that is related to supporting stroke survivors to recover. There is also a path for you to join me as a sponsored guest of the show. Just go to recoveryafterstroke.com/contact, and fill out the contact form explaining briefly which category you belong to.

Introduction – Abigail Atkinson

Bill Gasiamis 2:33
And I will respond with more details about how we can connect via Zoom. This is episode 271. And my guest today is Abigail Atkinson, who experienced a stroke while at yoga, aged 35. A few days after a chiropractic adjustment. Abigail Atkinson, welcome to the podcast.

Abigail Atkinson 2:52
Thank you so much. Great to be here.

Bill Gasiamis 2:55
Yeah, thank you for being here. Thank you for reaching out. Tell me a little bit about what happened to you.

Abigail Atkinson 3:01
I had a stroke on January 25, 2012. I was actually in the middle of teaching a yoga class where I was working at the time I was working at ancestry.com and had just started teaching yoga. And right about halfway through the class, I started to feel sick.

Abigail Atkinson 3:20
And I remember feeling like I was getting laryngitis feeling hot, and opening the door going and opening the door to cool it off. And then I just started feeling sicker and sicker. I started to get a terrible pain in my neck.

Abigail Atkinson 3:37
And my right side started to feel numb. I realized that I was significantly sick. So I talked the students down to Shavasana. That’s the final relaxation posture in a yoga class. So I talked them down. Once they were down, I went and sat down, leaned up against the wall, and kind of just waited for it to pass thinking that I was just having a moment and it didn’t pass the pain in my neck became excruciating.

Abigail Atkinson 4:14
And I was no longer able to get up. So I crawled over to one of the employees. And he helped me out of the room. Fortunately, we were right across the hall from the facilities room at the office. And they called 911.

Abigail Atkinson 4:33
And it was interesting as I was sitting there in that room waiting for the ambulance to arrive. It was looking dead on at a poster that was saying look for the signs of stroke. So I was like, Oh, my gosh, I’m having a I think I’m having a stroke.

Knowing when to follow your instincts

Abigail Atkinson 4:49
There are so many parts of the story and I’m sure I’m not going to tell it to you in chronological order, but ultimately the EMT did arrive on the scene, and I was young at the time, my stroke happened almost 12 years ago, he examined me and said, I think you have vertigo.

Abigail Atkinson 5:15
So I recommend you go lie down and rest for a couple of hours. If you still feel sick, you know, go see your doctor, my wife had vertigo a couple of weeks ago. So that’s probably what this is. And before, you know, there was like 10 or 15 minutes before the ambulance came.

Abigail Atkinson 5:32
And I was having difficulty just sitting in a chair, I was like, falling out of the chair, I was throwing up. I had this horrible, awful pain in my neck. It was very dizzy. And I thought that I was dying. I had a moment where I was saying goodbye to my children, I was like talking to God to take care of my children.

Abigail Atkinson 5:53
I was like, this is it, I think I’m dying. It’s very surreal to think that you’re dying. So when the EMT told me to rest I was “What?” I had a choice to make to either listen to the medical authority, which were taught to do, or to listen to myself. And I felt pretty strongly I needed to go to the hospital.

Abigail Atkinson 6:16
So I made him take me to the hospital. And he did, didn’t use his sirens or anything like that he kind of just moseyed to the hospital, which, fortunately, wasn’t that far away. So I luckily got to the hospital, within the first hour of the onset of symptoms.

Abigail Atkinson 6:34
And the neurologist at the ER could tell immediately that I was having a stroke, even before I had a CT. And of course, they gave me a CT, they found a tear on the inside lining of my right vertebral artery, the blood had clotted to heal that tear.

Abigail Atkinson 6:53
And that’s what caused my stroke. So I just always tell that first part of the story because, if I had listened to the EMT, and not gone to the hospital, my deficits probably would have been far greater. Maybe I wouldn’t have ever made it to the hospital, maybe that would have been the end of my life.

Abigail Atkinson 7:16
So even if I had been wrong, you know, even if I hadn’t been having a stroke, I think it’s important that we learn how to listen to our bodies that we trust ourselves. You know, because if I hadn’t made them take me to the hospital, even more than what I might have faced having a stroke was what would have happened to my self-trust, there would have been a huge thing in it.

Abigail Atkinson 7:49
So that’s just really an important part of what saved my life and what made my experience what it is. And so, no matter what, if you think you’re having a stroke or something’s wrong, listen to yourself, go to the hospital get help, no matter what anybody says.

Bill Gasiamis 8:06
Yeah, how old were you?

Abigail Atkinson 8:09
35 years old. Yeah. And so that was certainly part of it. For the EMT, I was very young. My stroke was caused by a neck injury. I had had a chiropractic adjustment four days prior, which was very painful. And I had been having headaches leading up to the stroke.

Abigail Atkinson 8:30
I had been taking large quantities of ibuprofen to kind of get through those headaches. And it was on the day that I that I said, I can’t keep I can’t keep taking this medicine. I’m not going to take anything today. That was the day that I had the stroke.

Bill Gasiamis 8:45
Yeah. So did the blood clot break off after it had formed? And causing ischemic stroke? Or did it close the deductive form and therefore decrease the size of the blood being able to pass through the artery?

Abigail Atkinson 9:05
I think it was the second option. Because the stroke happened near my brainstem and at my cerebellum. So I don’t know if it broke off or not. I don’t, I don’t know. That’s a great question.

Bill Gasiamis 9:22
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