The system let us down

By Jo

The day of my husband, Clayton's stroke, was like any other. He was cooking chops for dinner at the BBQ when it struck.

He put the chops on a plate and dropped them. He struggled to pick them up. I asked him if he was okay and he looked confused, I asked again, and his response was slurred, he grabbed his head and dropped to the floor. That is when I knew it was a stroke.

I called triple 000 immediately, the paramedics were excellent, they recognised it was a stroke too and told me that we were inside the time needed to treat his stroke. The paramedic called ahead and organised an evacuation to a hospital which could treat it. But that is where best practice time critical treatment unraveled.

At the local hospital, Clayton was left for 12 hours. The hospital is a regional Queensland hospital with no CT scanner or MRI, no telestroke, and no staff with the expertise to treat a stroke patient. We fell into a black hole. I cannot reconcile what happened, Clayton was essentially left to die.

When he was finally flown to Toowoomba, a scan showed that he had had a catastrophic stroke, a bleed, that had caused a 10 centermetre midline shift in his brain. I was told that he had a 1 per cent chance of life and they prepped him for a craniotomy.

The neurosurgeons were amazing and proved that 1 per cent was enough, but Clayton was massively impacted. He was in hospital for 9-months, paralysed on his right side, left with apraxia, aphasia, he had a tracheostomy and a feeding tube. We were glad he was still with us, but absolutely heartbroken. It did not need to be this way.

Our life was completely upended, we had lived on a farm for 30 years, but had to give it up. We now live in town; it's not how we saw our life going.

Clayton needs pretty much full-time care. We got NDIS support, which was supposed to make our lives easier, but we got ripped off to the tune of $134,000 by our NDIS support coordinator. This has put us back again.

So, what does the future look like for us? It looks daunting, but we are looking ahead. We will prevail, four years on we are in the process of finding our new normal, and I am beyond proud of my husband. We are surviving – we will make it.

We are calling on the Queensland Government to fund Telestroke in our state. We are the only state in Australia without it, and people are dying and being left with unnecessary lifelong disabilities.

I can only ask why?