Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor

back to take it dirty blood back to the heart and i had an arteriovenous malformation that i was born with this was a congenital malformation that i did not know was there and essentially an artery is directly connected to the vein without the capillary neutral pressure and these usually blow between the ages of 25 and 45 and i was 37 at the time so

So no, I did not know it was there.

There's nothing I could do about it unless somebody had given me an MRI and said, oh, Jill, we have a problem, which we do now.

But in those days, 97, we weren't given MRIs.

But I had been diagnosed when I was 17.

And I think this is really important for your audience.

I was diagnosed with migraine headache at the age of 17, 20 years before this thing blew.

And I have not had a migraine since I had surgery to remove the malformation.

So if there is someone in your audience who experiences migraine headache and none of the current medications, which are really excellent for migraine, if none of those meds help, I encourage people,

Go get a scan.

Go get your brain looked at to see what's actually going on inside of your head.

Because knowing if you have an organic problem, I think, is really important.

If the meds don't work, then absolutely you want to go and see, okay, what else is maybe going on inside of.

And I have had people write to me and say, I heard you give this advice on a podcast and it saved my life.

So who knows who out there, you know, we can influence positively.

Yeah, so the typical type of stroke that happens is when a blood clot gets thrown in your body and it goes up into the blood vessels in the brain and those brain arteries get smaller and smaller, they taper.

And so a blood clot will go into that tapering blood vessel and then when it's too big, it's gonna block the flow.

So that's called an ischemic stroke.

And so the warning signs, here are the warning signs.

And I use S-T-R-O-K-E to help people remember what's going on.