At 63, Gordon Robb is an active Scot, comfortable in his shoes and aware of the risks inherent to his age. He knows the main points of stroke and, above all, the signs to watch out for. However, when he himself is concerned, what sets him on the path comes out of the nails of everything he has learned. Here is the astonishing sign that he noticed a few hours before going to consult.
Words that have become incomprehensible, like a foreign language
Last September, this retiree noticed something strange in his daily life. As he checks his emails on his phone, the words appear clearly… but no longer mean anything.
“I was in the garden, came in for a cup of tea and checked my emails on my phone – and it was like they were in a foreign language”he says in
The Independent. “I could see them clearly and see where they were coming from, but the words meant nothing to me.”
Thinking at first of simple fatigue after a short night, he minimizes it. That same evening, the messages from his loved ones about the Ryder Cup seemed just as illegible to him. He prefers to go to bed early, convinced that everything will return to normal.
The next day, however, nothing became clearer and the worry grew. He then plans to consult his general practitioner. But it is the insistence of a cousin, marked by the recent death of her husband after a stroke, that changes everything: she takes him directly to the emergency room.
Rapid treatment which saved him from serious after-effects
The diagnosis falls: Gordon Robb suffered a hemorrhagic stroke. A case all the more surprising since isolated difficulty recognizing written words only concerns a tiny minority of patients at the time of the stroke.
However, this decision to go to the hospital proved decisive. “I’m incredibly lucky, and quite honestly, I felt like an imposter in the stroke ward because I was exactly the same as always, except suddenly I couldn’t read.”he confides.
Knowing the classic signs, facial weakness, inability to raise an arm, speech problems, he had not imagined being affected. “I knew some of the classic signs of a stroke, but I didn’t have any of them.” “It just goes to show the importance of paying attention to unusual symptoms, even if they’re symptoms you’ve never heard of before.”
“If I hadn’t gone to the hospital and received prompt treatment, I could have been walking around with a time bomb in my head.”he emphasizes.
The view of Dr Gérald Kierzek: a very misleading language disorder
According to Dr. Gérald Kierzek, emergency physician, this type of symptom can be particularly confusing, because it affects language functions without causing an obvious motor deficit.
“A stroke can manifest itself through very confusing language disorders, for example having the sudden impression that the words you read or hear are in a “foreign language”, when in fact it is your usual language”he explains.
This phenomenon is explained by the damage to language areas of the brain, most often located in the left hemisphere. The patient can then:
- Reading without understanding, as if the text were in another language (what we call alexia);
- No longer correctly understand the words heard (comprehension aphasia);
- Or even speak fluently but incomprehensibly to those around you, as in Wernicke’s aphasia.
More rarely, certain brain lesions can even cause “foreign accent syndrome”, with a sudden change in intonation and pronunciation.
Other little-known but essential signs of stroke to spot
Apart from the famous acronym FAST (Paralyzed face, Inertia of one arm, Speech disorder, Extreme urgency), other symptoms can be isolated and go unnoticed:
- Sudden visual disturbances (double vision, blurred vision or loss of a visual field);
- A sudden and unusual headache, sometimes described as “the worst headache of one’s life”;
- Intense dizziness, balance or walking problems;
- Sudden difficulty swallowing;
- Confusion, disorientation or unexplained changes in behavior;
- Difficulty performing everyday actions or understanding simple instructions.
“Certain strokes or TIAs (“mini-strokes”) can even cause very transient symptoms: fleeting loss of vision in one eye, tingling, language problems that resolve quickly, or the feeling that “something is wrong” without obvious signs.”
The right reaction to an unusual sign
For Dr. Gérald Kierzek, the main lesson of this story is clear: any sudden neurological symptom, even atypical, must alert.
“A sudden disturbance in language, vision, balance, memory or unusual behavior should be considered as a possible stroke,” he insists.
The action to take is simple but vital: immediately call 15 or 112 to receive emergency brain imaging, even if the symptoms seem mild or regress.
In Gordon Robb’s case, this “simple” reading problem was actually the warning sign of a brain hemorrhage. Proof that, when faced with an unusual and sudden sign, it is better to consult too early than too late “because every minute saved can save neurons and avoid irreversible after-effects.”