HERSHEY, Pa. — The juice glass clattered to the ground, but Carolina Rosario, from Harrisburg, didn’t know how. One moment, she was holding the cup in her hand, and the next, the spill spread across the floor. She said she felt disoriented, like her voice wasn’t her own, but the feeling subsided, and she went to work as usual.
Three months later, the feeling struck again — her tongue felt heavy, one side of her mouth drooped, and her voice echoed in her ears. One arm felt like it had disappeared, she said. Rosario tried to hold on to her phone, but it dropped to the floor one, two, three times. Rosario never felt it in her hand. This wasn’t something she could shake off. She called 911 and went to the Emergency Department at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.
At age 37, Rosario became part of a startling statistic — she’s one of the 55,000 women in the U.S. who experience a stroke each year. Penn State Health neurologist Lakshmi Shankar explains that strokes are sudden impairments of neurological function. The most common form of stroke is called an ischemic stroke and occurs when blood flow to a part of the brain is blocked. Although strokes are often thought of as a condition that primarily affects men, that’s not the case…