Surviving a Silent Threat | St. Luke’s Health System

Skip breakfast and it’s not uncommon to feel a little under the weather. That’s what Stacee Cassidy, 47, thought was happening in April 2022, while she was on a Zoom call for a leadership meeting at her church. But the feeling of “unhappiness” turned into a critical situation in just a few moments. Stacee felt a strange sensation of liquid flowing from her shoulders to her head. “My body froze and I fell to the ground, hit my head and started vomiting.”

Stacee was still conscious and luckily her iPad had fallen face up next to her. Although she was barely able to move, she was able to tap and talk. She told her fellow leaders in Washington, D.C., that she needed immediate help, and they were able to alert paramedics in Kansas City.

The whole time, Stacee hadn’t panicked, but then she looked up and saw her puppy in the hallway. “The way he looked at me – he didn’t want to come near me. That’s when I knew I was in trouble.

Stacee managed to make her way across the floor to unlock the front door for paramedics, who took her to a nearby hospital. But Stacee was still in danger. At the hospital, she had a seizure. Recognizing that Stacee had a neurological problem and needed specialized care, doctors transferred her to the Marion Bloch Neuroscience Institute at Saint Luke’s. As the region’s premier advanced neurological care center for both critical and long-term cases, the Neuroscience Institute team regularly cares for patients with particularly difficult and demanding neurological diseases.

Doctors determined Stacee had a brain aneurysm, a weakened spot in the wall of an artery. It had ruptured, leading to a hemorrhagic stroke or brain hemorrhage. Stacee’s condition was life-threatening and doctors performed emergency surgery to repair the aneurysm and save her life, but Stacee still had a long road to recovery.

She spent the next several weeks at Saint Luke’s Rehabilitation Institute, a state-of-the-art inpatient facility located on the campus of Saint Luke’s South Hospital in Overland Park. There, she underwent therapy to regain her ability to walk, rebuild her muscles, relearn basic movements and functions, and deal with short-term memory loss.

She commends the Rehabilitation Institute team for having both in-depth expertise and a personal touch, helping her recover.
doing whatever she needed to do at any given time. “My team had the perfect balance of when to push me and when to give me a little grace to let me get through it,” she says. “They worked really hard, against all odds, to make sure I was okay. »

In the meantime, however, Stacee’s doctors had discovered the root cause of her aneurysm: Stacee had an arteriovenous malformation, or AVM, in her brain. An AVM is essentially a tangled ball of arteries and veins. Because they are not properly connected, they can disrupt blood circulation. This can cause an aneurysm, which can then burst, as happened in Stacee’s case.

“Her aneurysm was treated, but her AVM — the underlying cause of the aneurysm in the first place — was not treated,” says Yifei Duan, MD, a Saint Luke’s neurosurgeon who met Stacee after her first surgery. ’emergency.

AVMs themselves are rare, and even in people who have them, they do not usually cause aneurysms. The majority of people with AVMs have no symptoms. Looking back, Stacee only remembers having headaches a few weeks before her incident. Like most people with this condition, Stacee didn’t know she had an AVM.

During their visit, Dr. Duan told Stacee and her adult daughter, Jada, that their condition was aggressive. The only way to treat it was to surgically remove it – and the sooner the better. Although he told her there was a high success rate, Stacee still wasn’t prepared for the news. “It made me cry,” Stacee recalled. “After weeks of rehabilitation, Dr. Duan simply gave us tissues and let us cry.”

Dr. Duan explained the procedure and Stacee decided to proceed with the operation two weeks later, in August 2022. The operation was successful. Afterwards, Stacee focused entirely on her recovery.

“I decided, ‘Now I’m going to get my life back.’ I made this decision knowingly,” she says. “It’s important to realize that your recovery process depends a lot on your perspective. You have to trust your healthcare providers and do the work. No one can do it for you.

Three months later, Stacee returned to work and her latest scans show she is completely cured of her AVM. She reports no lasting negative effects.

“People don’t even know I had brain surgery. I don’t have the words to express my gratitude to everyone within the Saint Luke’s Health System.