OLIVIA’S STORY

“When we called Cohen Children’s Medical Center they said ‘yes,’ and they sent an ambulance to pick her up.As it turns out, she had suffered a stroke and was paralyzed on the left side,” her dad recalls. “Everybody there made us feel a lot better. They stayed on top of the situation from the very beginning.”

Olivia, Staten Island, Stroke Patient
When Olivia had what appeared to be a cold and her pediatrician prescribed a common antibiotic, her parents noticed she developed a twitch in her right hand. When they took her to the neighborhood hospital on Staten Island, her doctors ran tests that day and into the next. But when it came to the CAT scan, her parents recall the anesthesiologist on call was hesitant to do the imaging. That’s when they decided to find doctors who were confident they could help.

“When we called Cohen Children’s Medical Center they said ‘yes,’ and they sent an ambulance to pick her up. As it turns out, she had suffered a stroke and was paralyzed on the left side,” her dad recalls. “Everybody there made us feel a lot better. They stayed on top of the situation from the very beginning.”

In addition to the stroke, Olivia (a year-and-a-half at the time) had suffered sinus venous thrombosis, a rare condition of blood clots in the veins of the brain most likely brought on by the pneumonia. “It was a very unusual condition,” Dr. Suchitra Acharya recalls. “When we first got here, there were four teams of doctors trying to find out what was wrong with her,” her father explained. “They had a hematologist, neurologist, cardiologist, pulmonologist and a doctor from infectious disease too. The end result was there was no reason why it happened, it just happened. Look at her – if we didn’t tell you she had a stroke, you wouldn’t know it.”

After a 10-day hospital stay, Olivia returned home and underwent months of physical and occupational therapy to help her regain her motor skills. “She bounced back pretty quickly,” her dad recalls. With speech and motor skills on par, Olivia’s only medication is a daily baby aspirin and her parents and doctor are happy to report she’s in excellent condition.