Doctors say new stroke treatment marks a 'watershed moment' for patients in northeastern Ontario

Sean Gilroy was having trouble seeing the baseball game on TV. And he couldn't seem to get up off the couch.

The 36-year-old Sudbury man hadn't been feeling well since a trip to the chiropractor earlier that week and was home alone after insisting his wife Rebecca, who was expecting their first child at the time, go out golfing.

She called to check up on him. He tried to ask for help, but all she heard was mumbling.

"I figure something's wrong and I'm trying to sound distressed," Gilroy said, remembering that day in June 2022.

"Hard when you're having a stroke and don't realize it."

Hours later Rebecca came home to find him covered in vomit in an upstairs bathtub and called 911.

After being rushed to the Sudbury hospital, Sean could hear doctors telling his wife about a new type of surgery for stroke patients. 

"In my head I'm thinking 'Do the surgery, because I can't live like this," said the St. Charles College teacher. 

'Things have completely changed'

The surgery is known as endovascular thrombectomy and involves inserting tubes into a patient's groin, that travel up to the brain and can suction out large blood clots that are the cause of some strokes.

"I would say this is the watershed moment in the history of stroke treatment," said Dr. Ravinder Jeet Singh, a stroke neurologist at Health Sciences North. 

"Things have completely changed, because in the past, these patients were having either very bad outcomes and a lot of patients were dying because of these big clots. And now, many of those patients are now able to live, and live independently."

Some 115 stroke patients have had procedure since the regional hospital in Sudbury started offering it in February 2020; about half of them from elsewhere in the northeast.

Susan Bursey, the regional director of the Northeastern Ontario Stroke Network, said about 1,200 people are admitted to hospitals across the northeast with strokes every year. About 300 of them are in Sudbury.

She said the program requires extra training for staff in Sudbury, as well as at smaller hospitals who need to identify stroke patients who are good candidates to be transferred to Health Sciences North for endovascular thrombectomy.

"A patient who comes here for stroke may access care from over 15 departments, dozens and dozens of team members all contribute and so it certainly takes a village to sustain this kind of program," she said.

Dr. Singh said the treatment doesn't work for all stroke patients, but when done within 24 hours of the stroke, it can have dramatic results.

"It's remarkable. And in some cases, we see that as soon as we pull the clot out," he said. 

"Not speaking at all, not understanding, completely weak on one side. And then as soon as the clot is out, they start to lift their arm, they start to lift their leg up."

Gilroy started to feel better right away and now less than a year later, there are days he's able to forget that he even had a stroke.

He said that's especially true when he's playing with his seven-month-old daughter Emma. 

"It was absolutely life changing," said Rebecca Gilroy. 

"He's back to doing everything he did before. That procedure saved his life. It saved his quality of life."