18-year Old Athlete Kylie Lough Shares How She Recovered From a Stroke
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It was in July, about a month before she started school at Boston University, where she was recruited to their Division 1 (D1) rowing team, when Kylie Lough, 18, experienced a stroke. Lough was in a small, remote town on New Zealand’s South Island on a trip with an international rowing program. She was in her hotel scrolling on her phone when all of the sudden, everything started to spin. Then she blacked out. When she came to, she noticed she couldn’t control her limbs. She yelled, terrified, not realizing that the noises she was making were slurred.
Lough gathered the last bit of control she had over her legs and stumbled to her hotel door, unlocking it and opening it to a hallway full of her fellow rowers that had heard the commotion. They helped her to the ground when she could no longer stand or move her legs.
One of the coaches drove her to the nearest hospital, four hours away, where she vomited for most of the journey. When they finally arrived, she was too sick to get an MRI, and her medical team didn’t suspect it was a stroke anyway.
The next morning, still unable to talk, Lough was able to get an MRI, which showed her cerebellum — the part of the brain that sits at the bottom of the skull, which plays a role in motor function and balance control — was mostly dead. The doctors knew immediately that despite being a teenager, she’d had a stroke, which cuts oxygen supply to a part of the brain. An echocardiogram later in her months-long hospital stay found a patent foramen ovale, a hole between the atria, or upper left and right sides of the heart, was likely the cause.
According to the American Heart Association (AHA), this hole usually closes within a few months of being born, but in about one-quarter of people, it stays open. Usually it doesn’t cause health issues, so they often go undetected until later in life, as was the case with Lough. In rare instances, an unclosed hole can cause blood clots, which can travel to the brain and cause a stroke.
Although strokes in younger people like Lough are rare, strokes in people younger than 50 years are on the rise, according to a review published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine.
Despite having a stroke, Lough, who is now 20, did speech, occupational, and physical therapy as much as 10 hours a week, during her first semester of college. She even kept her spot on the rowing team and was cleared to row again during her spring semester. Shortly after, she and her teammates placed third in the National Championship, less than a year after having her stroke.
We sat down with Lough, who is part of the AHA Go Red For Women Real Women 2024, to hear how she navigates heart disease as a young adult and where she gets support.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Everyday Health: Did you have any warning signs before your stroke?
Kylie Lough: I had no warning signs at all, even the minutes beforehand. The day before I had practiced rowing and I have pictures of us playing in the snow that morning. When I first got to the hospital, the three things they tested me for were performance-enhancing drugs, pregnancy, and alcohol. I can’t really blame them because when you look at an 18-year-old patient, you don’t think stroke. They didn’t find the hole in my heart until later in my hospital stay in New Zealand when they did an echocardiogram.
EH: What was finding support like as a young person, especially during recovery?
KL: Before I had one, I had no idea what a stroke even was, and after, it was hard to get any support from people my own age. The most common responses I got when I told people were things like, “Is that even real?” and “Are you just being dramatic?” My parents were my main support, but the medical team, too. And my rowing coach when I got to college knew exactly what it was and he was very supportive of me and my recovery.
EH: In addition to getting through your first year of college, you did 5 to 10 hours of physical, occupational, and speech therapy every week. What kept you motivated while having to juggle all of this?
KL: My main motivation was knowing that I had worked so hard to get where I was when I had my stroke. I was a recruited D1 athlete at Boston University. The motivation was not wanting this [my stroke] to be my new normal. I also wanted to prove people wrong, anyone who saw me as this girl who was not at practice and assuming I was much slower than them.
EH: What advice do you have for young people who have been diagnosed with heart disease or who have had a stroke?
KL: Know you aren’t alone. There are people you can reach out to if you want understanding. It will feel hopeless at times, like recovery is taking too long. But if you have even a small goal and focus on reaching it, it makes the recovery process rewarding.
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