Symptoms

So when it comes to a stroke, it’s important to recognize what the signs and symptoms of stroke are. But to understand that very well, it’s important to sort of recognize maybe some of the anatomy of the brain and anatomy, the blood vessels. And so the first thing to sort of realize is that your brain is sort of cut right down the middle and there’s blood flow on the right side of the brain and there’s blood flow in the left side of the brain. And because of that, the symptoms are very frequently lateralized. And so that’s actually an important part of how when I see somebody, if I’m thinking about stroke, how I evaluate them, I’m looking for these lateralized signs. And so the idea here is that if a blood clot were to travel up the carotid artery and, and land somewhere in the brain, say on the right side, while I could envision that the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, so they can have numbness or weakness on the left side, they could have vision changes on the left side. And now on the flip side, if it were to come up the left side, it would affect the right side of the body.