Rebuilding the Brain Researchers in UGA’s Regenerative Bioscience Center harness the body’s natural healing ability and turn it up to 11. WRITTEN BY LEIGH HATAWAY MA ’17
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n most respects, May 6, 2022, was a typical school day for Amy Paulk Grist. Tift County High School buzzed with end-of-the-year activities. Tift County is the only high school serving Tifton, Georgia, a mostly rural community off I-75, just an hour north of the Florida border. A veteran economics teacher of more than a decade, Amy was wrapping up another successful year at the high school of nearly 2,300 students when her vision started to blur.
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Something wasn’t right. She called her brother, Dr. Eric Paulk. After describing her symptoms, the director of the emergency department at Tift Regional Medical Center didn’t hesitate. “Amy, you’re having a stroke,” he told her. “Get to the hospital.” When Amy arrived, the team rushed her into the back. It turned out that she hadn’t had a stroke—she’d had three. The doctors administered the gold standard of stroke care, a medication
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called tPA (short for Tissue Plasminogen Activator). The drug breaks up blood clots and restores blood flow to the brain. But it didn’t work. Pressure built up inside Amy’s head, becoming so intense that the doctors had to perform a craniotomy, removing a portion of her skull to give her brain some relief from the swelling. The neurosurgeon said there wasn’t much hope. She would probably die.