A Fort Worth, Texas artist and author said she learned the importance of recognizing the symptoms of a stroke and the importance of the first three hours after it happens.
Sharron Connelly was at home in her art studio when she felt something she had never experienced before.
"It started going up my hand, numb, and up the side of my face," she said.
Connelly said she quickly realized it was a stroke.
Emergency room doctors at Texas Health Azle started Connelly on a clot-busting drug designed to restore the blood flow to her brain.
She said she worried she might not live.
She said she feared she would lose her motor skills, her speech or her memory if she survived, all things essential to the painter and author who is currently working on a movie script about Leonardo Da Vinci.
"I kept saying, 'My brain, I can't let anything happen to my brain,'" she said. "I've got all this stuff about Leonardo in there."
A helicopter airlifted Connelly to Texas Health Fort Worth, where doctors continued giving her the clot-busting medication known as rt-PA.
The medication is only effective if it's given in the first few hours after the on set of a stroke, making early recognition of the symptoms key to saving a patient's vital functions such as memory and speech.
"If you can give the medicine quickly, you can save all or a lot of it," said Dr. Roger Blair, a neurologist who treated Connelly when she arrived at the hospital in Fort Worth.
"It's amazing when it happens," he said. "It's fantastic."
Medical studies have suggested the drug may be effective longer after the on-set of symptoms than first thought.
Doctors at Texas Health are now looking at giving rt-PA as long as four hours after a stroke in some cases.
Sharron Connelly has almost no residual effects today.
She is back to painting and writing, and credits the doctors with saving her life and her career.
They credit her for getting help quickly.
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