ravioli, and for heaven’s sake, do not drive yourself to hospital. Call 911, because the quicker you get to hospital, the better your chance of minimizing the damage caused by the stroke, if you happen to be starting one. How quick is quick? In theory, we should be aiming to get everyone with a threatened stroke dealt with in under 3 hours, and given that this includes the time it takes the patient to get to hospital and the time it takes to do the necessary tests, that’s not a lot of time you can spend debating about what to do.
.....Why? Because over the last decade, we’ve really improved our knowledge about (to paraphrase my buddy, Shell Busey), “the who to, the how to, the when to” of stroke treatment (the “why to” doesn’t matter, and the “where to” has remained pretty constant over the years). That is, we now know to whom to give those powerful clot-busting drugs that can partially or completely dissolve a clot in a brain artery and thus limit the damage a stroke will cause, we know when to give those drugs to make sure they actually open the plugged vessel, and we know how to administer them so that they are most effective.
.....Now, on to another feature of strokes that I really want you to be more aware of, and that is that we all simply have to start being more serious about what we call “mini-strokes”, or which doctors refer to as “TIAs” for transient ischemic attacks. In a mini-stroke, a person suffers one or several of all the same symptoms listed earlier, but the symptoms are only temporary, either a few seconds or a few minutes. So, a person with a TIA is “well” again as soon as the symptoms pass.
.....But they’re not well. In fact, their health is in significant danger because unless they receive appropriate care and prevention, people who suffer a mini-stroke are at much higher risk of suffering a full-fledged stroke over the next 3 months (some even in the next 48 hours), making a mini-stroke into a sort of stroke-in-waiting.
.....By the way, remember those symptoms listed earlier which you promised to memorize? OK. Without looking back, what’s the third one? Gotcha, eh.
.....So, here’s another suggestion. Instead or relying on your ever-more fallible memory, why not instead pin that list with a magnet somewhere you will see it frequently and where you can check it regularly to refresh your memory, such as the fridge, although if that’s where you pin it, please do me one favour: when you loiter over that tub of Ben and Jerry’s “refreshing your memory” several times a day, please don’t tell anyone that this was my suggestion.

Dr. Art Hister can be heard on CKNW and other Corus Radio Network stations on House Calls on Saturdays at 10 AM, as well as seen on Global TV news on Saturday mornings at 9:20.