Stroke Patient Says It Was No Accident Specialists Were There: Yolanda Jones is not a bit surprised that a wide variety of medical specialists just happened to be in John C. Lincoln North Mountain Hospital, available to respond exactly when she needed each of them to contribute to the team effort to save her life.

Above: Yolanda Jones and Misha, the little friend who was waiting for her to come home!

“If it weren’t for God, all those doctors would not have been there” to stop her from dying and to save her from paralysis, she said. “I love my doctors and I appreciate what they did. But glory should go to God where it belongs. There was no luck in my story. God is in control.”

Jones believes her experience is testimony to God’s grace. “If you have to have a major stroke that could easily kill you,” she says, “do it in the hospital when and where God has brought all of the expert physicians you need. I was so blessed.”

Indeed, say a whole team of doctors who worked together to save her. Her stroke was so severe that she easily could have died or been completely incapacitated. If it had happened before she got to the hospital, it could have killed her.  If it had happened an hour later, during surgery, while she was under anesthesia, she could have been paralyzed and dysfunctional.

Instead, she’s almost unscathed by the experience.

“I have a little trouble lifting my right foot to step up on a curb, for example,” she said recently from her son’s home in Colorado.  “I also have some numbness in my right hand. I probably need some physical therapy, which I’ll get in the near future.”

Her doctors were thrilled to hear that update. But let’s go back to the beginning, when Jones went to see cardiologist Warren Breisblatt, MD, in his North Phoenix Heart Center office on the John C. Lincoln North Mountain Hospital campus. She’d been bothered by some heart palpitations but didn’t think it was serious.

“I did an ultrasound and a carotid angiogram,” Dr. Breisblatt said. “The tests showed that her left internal carotid artery was almost completely blocked.”

That’s not good. The carotid artery is a major blood vessel that comes out of the heart and supplies the head and neck with fresh blood full of life-supporting oxygen. When it splits into external and internal arteries, it’s the internal carotid that supplies oxygen to the brain.

Dr. Breisblatt immediately contacted one of John C. Lincoln’s most talented cardiothoracic surgeons, Kevin Brady, MD, to schedule an operation called a carotid endarterectomy. It’s a delicate, sophisticated procedure that clears the blockage – blood clot or plaque – out of the artery and allows blood to resume free flow.

Jones, who’d never had any cardiac issues except for the irritating occasional irregular heartbeat, came into the hospital and was being prepped for surgery, chatting away with her anesthesiologist when everything froze.