Luis Romero’s steady diet of midnight shift work in a Northwest Indiana scrap mill and a rambunctious lifestyle as a teen took its toll on his health three winters ago and became his ultimate wake-up call.
The warning bell sounded at 10 p.m. on a blustery February night. Romero had just driven away from his mom’s house in East Chicago.
“My vision went in the left eye, so I decided to drive myself to the Emergency department at St. Catherine Hospital,” he recalls. “By the time I got there, everything turned completely white. I could barely see.”
Romero shuffled toward the entrance and blacked out. Not only was he suffering from a stroke, but an aortic dissection, a life threatening tear in the wall of the major artery carrying blood out of the heart. His next memory is waking up four days later in the Intensive Care Unit.
“I was lucky I woke up at all,” he recalls after later learning he had only a 30 percent chance of survival. Today he calls the action taken by the stroke team specialists the work of angels. “I can’t thank them often enough,” he adds.
Chief Nursing Officer Paula Swenson says Romero was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. St. Catherine Hospital is a Cycle-Five Chest Pain Center and Primary Stroke Center. The hospital earned the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get With the Guidelines® Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award and Target: Stroke Honor Roll Elite Award in 2017 from the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association for its commitment to stroke care.
Community Hospital and St. Mary Medical Center also have earned the Gold Seal of Approval™ from the Joint Commission as Primary Stroke Centers.
When it comes to expert stroke intervention, the hospitals of Community Healthcare System offer timely scientific evidence based-care. Visit https://www.comhs.org/services/stroke-care.
