Powerful new stroke treatment

HOUSTON – Healthy, young and vibrant, that's how many would describe the inside of a cheerleading gym and how many would describe the gym's owner.

That is why Kristi Miller, owner of LSA Athletics in Humble, never imagined she would wake up one morning having a massive stroke.

"The room spun, and then I hit the floor," she said.

Typically, with a blood clot in the brain, doctors have just a few hours to administer a drug called TPA to break the clot and save the person's quality of life.

"I needed something more, or I wasn't going to survive," Miller said.

For Miller, her clot was so large, the drug did nothing for her.

Fortunately LifeFlight got her to the Texas Medical Center, which is one of two hospitals in Texas that can perform a new procedure to physically travel through the brain and remove the clot up to six hours after the onset of symptoms.

"Time is highly important," said Dr. Amrou Sarraj, neurologist at Memorial Hermann Mischer Neuroscience Institute and UT Health.

Sarraj is a leading expert on this kind of procedure, called endovascular thrombectomy, in which a physician inserts a long thin tube to actually retrieve and remove the clot from the blood vessel.

Sarraj said it can take patients who would otherwise lose the ability to walk or talk after a stroke and return them to good health.

"One out of four patients end up going back to almost normal life of independence, [it] is probably the most powerful treatments in the history of medicine," Sarraj said.

Miller said when she woke up, she had no idea how close she was to losing everything.

"My dad walked in the [hospital] room and said, 'This is the happiest moment of my life to see you like this.' I didn't know what happened to me. I knew I had a stroke, but I didn't know the severity of the stroke," she said.

Miller said she went back to work in about two weeks and she said she's recovered nearly 100 percent.