A New Treatment for Strokes
by Anne Kelly KFYR-TV
Posted on 11/17/2008
Every year, nearly 800,000 Americans suffer a stroke, which can lead to brain damage or death. Full recovery is possible, but only if proper treatment is available. And now there`s one more option for some doctors in North Dakota to choose from.
A Bismarck father of two recently suffered a stroke but you can`t tell by looking at him. That`s because a new procedure ensured his survival and full recovery.
The stroke Tom Kloster suffered four months ago has left him with minor memory loss, but he still remembers his near-death experience like it was yesterday.
“I walked outside and for some reason I just fell, obviously the stroke paralyzed my right side,” says Kloster. “My neighbor stepped out and saw me and so he came out and called 911.”
An ambulance ride later and Kloster was at St. Alexius where Dr. Ralph Dunnigan and Brent Herbel began working to save his life.
“When he came in he couldn`t respond to any questions, he couldn`t talk, and he couldn`t move his right side,” Herbel says. Because a clot in a major artery in Kloster`s brain was cutting off blood flow to the rest of his brain.
Doctors typically have a six to eight hour window to remove clots from stroke victims veins or arteries before brain damage is irreversible. Dr. Herbel says he spent hours trying to clear the clot using the typical method of treatment, which involves shooting a drug toward the clot and trying to dissolve it. But it wasn`t working.
So as a last ditch effort he tried out a new procedure never before performed in North Dakota. Using the Merci retrieval device, Dr. Herbel ended up dragging the clot out of Kloster`s brain.
“What it involves is putting a little tiny catheter past a clot in the brain and then putting a little micro corkscrew into the clot and pulling the clot out,” Dr. Herbel says.
And that he did.
“I can remember at about 2:00 in the morning, the nurse standing with a little case that had a little black dot in it and she said `We got it, we got it, we got it,`” Kloster says. He was awake and responsive hours later, and Herbel, in awe of how well the procedure worked.
Herbel says his experience using the Merci Retrieval device with Kloster makes the list of the top most impressive things he`s seen since he`s been in medicine and because of the procedure`s success he plans to add it to his list of treatment options for certain stroke patients.
