TONTOGANY, Ohio — When you look at Matt Dzierwa, he’s the model for perfect health. A former Division I athlete, he played at Northwestern. He was a star athlete at St. John’s before that. That’s what makes what happened just a few weeks ago even scarier.
He wasn’t feeling well at school. But didn’t think too much of it. What he was experiencing were the early signs of a stroke.
“I laid down on the floor, just tried putting a heating pad on my back,” said Dzierwa. “Eventually my left arm started going numb a little bit, my face started tingling. Thank god for our trainer, Jen, she said ‘Hey, you got to go to the hospital.’ By the time I got to the hospital, I couldn’t walk.”
“Time was of the essence,” said Matt’s wife, Dasa. “He’s the epitome of great health. 20 minutes, 30 minutes longer of him being on that heating pad, I don’t know what the outcomes would have been.”
“Time is very, very essential in stroke treatments,” said Dr. Mouhammad Jumaa, a stroke specialist with ProMedica. “Any time you’re suffering from a brain or spinal cord injury, you actually lose the brain tissue very, very quickly, in the course of seconds. So, every second, every minute counts. There’s research that actually showed that every second counts, so we take that into account when we’re applying treatment.”
As Dr. Jumaa said, time is critical, but for the Dzierwa family, the reality of what was happening was almost unbelievable.
"Quite honestly, I thought when the ER nurse was coming back to me in the waiting room that she was going to share that, ‘Hey, we have an examination room in the ER, we’re good to go,’” said Dasa. “She’s like ‘We’re heading to the neuro ICU. We think your husband had a stroke.’ You go into shock.”
“If you feel the signs and symptoms, don’t hesitate. You got to go,” said Matt. “In the end, it doesn’t hurt to go. The alternative is not good.”
“We see some delay in stroke care mainly because of the assumption that this is a healthy individual, they should not be experiencing a stroke,” said Jumaa. “The message is everyone can have a stroke and it’s very important that once you recognize those stroke symptoms, to act very quickly as a patient, or a family member, or as an eyewitness, and for us as healthcare teams, it’s also very, very important that we act very quickly to be able to reverse this damage as quickly as we can.”
Dzierwa is now doing physical therapy and trying to work his way back to normal. He’s had to relearn how to walk and do things that he took for granted for so long.
“They say how the body is going to react to everything and it’s going to take time, unfortunately,” said Matt. “Your mind doesn’t think like that when you’re on the go, and you want to do things, and you want things to happen now, but it’s what the body tells you. It’s not what your mind says.”
Thankfully, this story has a happy ending. Thankfully, they listened to the signs. Thankfully, Matt Dzierwa is here to share his story with others.
“I think now I’ve probably become more emotional knowing just how grateful that some other families don’t have this kind of happy ending for a situation,” said Dasa. “We took a bike ride on Sunday together and it was like, ‘Oh my gosh. I would never have ever thought that we would be doing that.’”
“Nobody’s ever really accused me of not living my life,” said Matt. “Probably most of the days, I see the sunrise and I see the sunset. I live my life and always have, but it tells you maybe to slow down a little bit. But I’ve always appreciated stuff, but I look at things a little different now and then.”
ProMedica says the easiest way to remember the signs of a stroke is through BE FAST.
- B – Balance trouble and dizziness
- E – Eyes (blurry or double vision)
- F – Face drooping or numbing (a person’s smile may look uneven)
- A – Arm weakness (a person can’t hold their arms up)
- S – Speech difficulty or trouble repeating a simple sentence
- T – Time to call 911