EvEry ry MinutE Minut counts Essentia Health Stroke Program Provides Fast, State-of-the-Art Care // By connie wirta
I was amazed at what Dr. Darkhabani could do and how much medicine had improved
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dina Kulaglic knew something was going terribly wrong in her body, and she knew she needed to find her husband. As she struggled to find the words to alert him, she collapsed in their condo. “I tried to call my husband but I couldn’t speak,” Kulaglic recalls. Her husband, Shaid, heard her fall and quickly called an ambulance. That’s when things began going right for Kulaglic, who had just suffered a severe stroke. Paramedics recognized Kulaglic’s symptoms and called in a stroke alert to the Emergency Department at nearby Essentia Health-Fargo. A specially trained team was waiting for her, ready to expedite the imaging and lab tests needed to confirm the diagnosis. Dr. Ziad Darkhabani, an interventional neurologist, found the 53-year-old Fargo woman had a large blood clot in a major artery on the left side of her brain. It threatened an area that controls language as well as sensation and movement in the right arm and leg. “Edina had a very severe stroke,’’ recalls Dr. Darkhabani. “It’s the worst side. Your language can be completely gone, so it can be devastating.” Within 60 minutes of her arrival, Kulaglic began receiving a powerful clot-busting drug called tPA. It must be administered within 4 1/2 hours of the onset of symptoms, so prompt action by Shaid and the medical team began paying off.
Dr. Darkhabani used a special test and high-resolution imaging to determine nearby brain tissue had not yet suffered permanent damage. Because the clot was in a large vessel, there was a high possibility that tPA alone would not completely open it. So the interventional neurologist took the next step. Using a tiny catheter, Dr. Darkhabani guided a special stent to the blood clot. First he opened the artery to allow blood flow and then he carefully pulled out the clot now lodged in the stent. “We were able to completely open the clot within 90 minutes of Edina’s arrival and that played the most important factor in her recovery,’’ says Dr. Darkhabani. “She’s made an amazing recovery.” “I was so very lucky, so fortunate,” says Kulaglic, who has made a full recovery from her stroke. She also considers herself fortunate to have benefited from the expertise of Dr. Darkhabani, who had joined Essentia Health-Fargo shortly before she suffered her stroke last August. Dr. Darkhabani and Dr. Michael Hill, an endovascular neurosurgeon, offer a new level of stroke care in the Fargo area. In the past, stroke patients like Kulaglic needed to be transported to specialists in the Twin Cities, which delayed care in situations where even minutes count. Essentia Health’s Stroke and Neurovascular Center features a $3.2 million state-of-the-art diagnostic and surgical suite. This new hybrid suite offers the stroke team the most advanced equipment available to