Woman told her pain was just a migraine – but she was actually having a stroke

A woman was told she was suffering from a migraine when she went into hospital with pain in her head, blurry vision, and a numb arm – but later it emerged that she was having a stroke.

TikTok user Courtrubes shared the story with her followers of a time she was misdiagnosed by a doctor, saying that it took almost 24 hours for her to get correctly diagnosed.

She said the pain in her head was so bad that she went to the emergency department of her local hospital and was even suffering seizures when she was there.

Despite this, doctors still thought she just had a migraine and didn’t take her condition seriously – until a neurologist finally confirmed she was having a stroke the next day.

In the social media video, which has been viewed over 316,000 times, the woman from Australia said: “Last year I go to the emergency department with the worst headache of my life, a numb arm, blurry vision and nausea.

“The nurse assesses me and says, ‘you’re probably having a migraine’ and the doctor assessed me and says the same thing and he says he’s going to put me on a drip for a few hours.

“I was like ok cool, anyway a few hours go by and he comes over to ask me how I’m feeling and I said, ‘my arm still feels really strange’ but he says he doesn’t think it’s anything bad and he’s going to send me home.

“So the nurse takes the cannula out of my arm and as soon as I stand up I blank out and p*** myself and the doctor’s like, ‘ohhh’.

“So they wheel me over to the emergency short stay unit for a few hours until the morning so I can be reassessed.

“A few hours later I have a bloody seizure so the wheel me back to the emergency department and the doctor was like, ‘oh I heard you caused a bit of a scene on the ward’.

“He does another lumbar puncture and I had another seizure in the middle of that and the neurologist came and told me I’d had a stroke.”

After the video was shared, many people commented to say they were surprised it took so long for the condition to be recognised.

One person said: “I knew you were going to say stroke within five seconds – the arm.”

While a second wrote: “How did it take that long for them to realise it was a stroke, like did they actually study?”

And a third added: “Stroke is literally the first thing I said to myself when you started saying what you were experiencing. Stroke pathways are in place for a reason.”

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