'It's all about timing': Amber Stewart suffered a stroke at 33 but time-critical care saved her life

Amber Stewart was at home with her 10-month-old son River when she felt her right leg suddenly stop working and became confused with her speech.

“I knew I had to get to the phone because I knew it felt serious,” she said.

“I sat on the couch to contain myself and then made the limping walk down the hall to my phone,” Ms Stewart said, recalling the moment from 2015.

An ambulance arrived a short time later and Ms Stewart, then 33, was rushed to the Rockhampton hospital from her home in Yeppoon, 40 kilometres away.

Ms Stewart, a photographer who is now 38, said doctors found she did not have any underlying health issues to blame for the stroke, but stress and lack of sleep may have contributed to it.

“The mental effects of having a stroke were very severe on me,” she said.

“I was like, ‘well why did this happen?’, and it really did make me check myself and the stress I was under.”

She said her experience proved the adage “it can happen to anyone” — a timely reminder during National Stroke Week.

Fortunately for Ms Stewart, the swift medical care she received aided her recovery and within a few days she was able to leave hospital, physically well.

She had regained feeling in her right leg and did not need much rehabilitation treatment — an outcome that could have been very different had her medical care been delayed.

New ultra-light technology to shorten response time in rural areas

The Stroke Foundation says regional Australians are 19 per cent more likely to experience a stroke.

They’re also more likely to die or be left with serious disability because of stroke.

Australian Stroke Alliance Chair Professor Geoffrey Donnan said the organisation was working to change those outcomes, through new diagnostic technology being developed for Royal Flying Doctor Service aircraft.

Improving retrieval times was critical, as outcomes for rural stroke victims were sometimes up to twice as poor as metropolitan outcomes.

“For Indigenous Australians they’re 20 per cent more likely to develop a stroke and they’re a decade younger than stroke patients in metropolitan Australia,” Professor Donnan said.

He said the alliance was working with three Australian companies to develop the new technology.

Queensland-based EMVision was using an electromagnetic-ray approach to image the brain non-invasively, “so instead of using a CT scan, it’s using this rather novel approach”.

An Adelaide company, MicroEx, is developing a new type of CT scan that has no moving parts, so it can be ultralight.

“The third is with Siemens,” he said “We’ll be taking the current half-tonne CT scan that we use in our Melbourne mobile stroke unit and making at ultra-lightweight, down to half its original weight.”

Ms Stewart said she hoped to see this technology developed soon.

‘Just call an ambulance’

According to the Stroke Foundation, stroke is one of Australia’s biggest killers, claiming more women than breast cancer and more men than prostate cancer.

Ms Stewart said had it not been for her son, who had experienced ill-health when he was first born, she probably wouldn’t have called an ambulance.

“Because I was so wired about health things at that time, I did actually call the ambulance,” she said.

She’s urging people not to take their health lightly and to always seek help if something feels off.

“Call an ambulance anyway, for everything,” she said.

“The hospitals would rather you go there and it not be a stroke, than you think it can’t be and then it ruins your life.”

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