When Dick Ehinger began having difficulty swallowing and slurring his speech while watching a football game on Thanksgiving last year, his family sensed something was wrong almost immediately.
His wife, Dot, tried talking to him and got very little response. When she reached for his hand it just dropped.
Their daughter, a nurse, and son-in-law, a cardiologist, visiting from out of town went into quick action and called 911. They thought Ehinger was having a stroke and knew that he needed to be seen within a three-hour window in order to administer tissue plasminogen activator (tPA).
"My son-in-law knew to ask if there was a hospital in the area with a rapid response stroke team," recalls Ehinger, 76. "We went past three or four other hospitals in order to get to Barnes-Jewish and it saved me."
Ehinger went straight to the Charles F. Knight Emergency and Trauma Center where tPA was administered immediately. Thanks to the timely response, he went from someone who was incoherent and feeling groggy back to his former self.
"By the time I was leaving the emergency department for the ICU, I could speak clearly and my family felt better about my condition," he says.
Ehinger was seen by neurologist Mark Goldberg, MD, director of the Hope Center for Neurological Disorders at Washington University School of Medicine. Dr. Goldberg is a member of the Barnes-Jewish Hospital stroke center led by William Powers, MD. Physician specialists are available 24 hours a day to provide advanced emergency care and consultation for patients with stroke and cerebrovascular diseases. The center also conducts leading basic and clinical research to help in the treatment of stroke.
"Mr. Ehinger had an excellent outcome after tPA, thanks to quick thinking by his family and the entire hospital team. They wasted no time at all in providing the right treatment," Dr. Goldberg says. "It is rewarding to be part of a comprehensive stroke center that does so much every day to help patients like Mr. Ehinger."
Since his stroke, Ehinger has not had any complications and there was no history of stroke in his family to indicate this might happen.
"I really believe knowledge is the key to this whole thing. Time was critical and it made all the difference to my success," he adds. "Today it''s like a dream."