It’s what made her question what she would do with the rest of her life. More than the trauma of the medical emergency or the realization that her workaholic days were behind her, it was the speechlessness that was the most frustrating, confusing, and anxiety-provoking. “It was the first time I realized I couldn’t say these things. “It was terrifying,” she says now, sitting in the same home, just up the stairs from where the whole ordeal started. When she first started rehab at Luminis Health Anne Arundel Medical Center and was asked questions by a speech therapist, Crane couldn’t verbalize her kids’ names, her address, or even her own name. It was the stroke, when the blood flow in her brain was disrupted, that caused the condition that wouldn’t allow her to find the right words to say, even months and years later. Thanks to her husband’s recounting of everything that happened after she got out of the hospital six weeks later, she at least had the full picture. Now she could barely get through a sentence. Before “the event,” she was more than comfortable talking. She was 47 years old, a mother of two teenagers, and had spent much of her adult life in medical sales. She was suffering from something called aphasia, a condition that robs a person of the ability to use their words. Not because she was scared or didn’t know what to say. During the final surgery, when doctors replaced her aortic valve, is when she believes she had a stroke.įor months after “the event,” as she and her family call it, Crane wanted to tell her story, “because I got through it all, which is unusual,” she says, but she couldn’t get the words out.
Over the next eight days, she endured four surgeries, suffered another tear in the aorta even closer to her heart than the first, and was put in a medically induced coma.
Doctors, nurses, and paramedics put her back in the ambulance, bound for the University of Maryland Medical Center. After she called 911 and was taken by ambulance to the local hospital, an ER doctor quickly diagnosed her with an aortic dissection, or a tear of the inner membrane of main blood vessel branching off the heart. In 2005, Judy Crane was working at her desk in the basement of her Millersville home when a sharp pain in her chest jarred her.
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