Yahoo Autos A Black nurse was discharged from the hospital with a life-threatening tear in her artery. Her doctor dismissed it as a migraine.
Ashanti Coleman, a nurse and stroke survivor, was discharged with what doctors called a migraine.
She really had a torn and blocked artery, and could have died if she didn't go to another facility.
The way doctors dismissed her pain, she said, is common among Black female patients.
Ashanti Coleman wished she could rip off her head. Over the past week, what had started as an ache on the right side had become increasingly persistent and intense. As a stroke survivor and nurse practitioner who works in a pain clinic, Coleman knew she wasn't experiencing a run-of-the-mill headache.
But in the emergency room that May of 2019, Coleman said she waited several hours before being seen. Eventually, she was admitted with a "mini stroke" diagnosis, but spent days awaiting attention from a neurologist to determine the source of her now severe headaches.
When the doctor did see her, he didn't ask about her pain or conduct a neurological exam, Coleman said. Rather, he dismissed it as a migraine and discharged her - despite the fact he had treated her first stroke and so knew her health history and profession. "That did nothing for me," said Coleman, who lives in Memphis with her husband and two kids.
That night, Coleman woke up with excruciating pain in her neck. "It felt like something was tearing," she said. So she went to a different hospital, where learned her right carotid artery - one of the two major sources of blood to the brain - was ruptured and 50% blocked, and she needed emergency surgery right away.
It turned out that, when doctors attempted to remove a clot after her first stroke in 2017, they damaged that artery. It didn't fully repair itself, creating the tear, blockage, and Coleman's symptoms.
"The whole right side of my brain was not getting in any oxygen or blood, which was causing those headaches," Coleman, now 41, told Insider. "Eventually, that tear could have gotten worse, and I could have died."
Coleman, an American Heart Association Go Red for Women volunteer, spoke to Insider about her experience as a two-time stroke survivor and Black woman navigating the healthcare system. Even as a PhD-level nurse, she said, she's subject to systemic racism that negatively affects care.
Coleman was 38 years old and healthy when she suffered her first stroke
When Coleman woke up one morning in 2017 with an ache on the right side of her head and body, she brushed it off and went to Starbucks. Back home, though, "the headache just kept pounding, just kept persisting," she said. Then, her husband noticed her speech was garbled.
In retrospect, Coleman says the symptoms were "textbook" stroke. But she was 38 years old, maintained a healthy weight and good blood pressure, exercised regularly, and didn't drink, smoke, or eat red meat. "I was just a little bit in denial when the symptoms started because I'm like, 'I don't have anything wrong with me,'" Coleman said.
But then a sharp pain went down her left side, the left side of her arm felt numb and tingly, and she lost coordination. "That's when I knew I was having a stroke," she said. Her race and birth control medications were her only risk factors.
