After the hospital stay, you might continue your rehabilitation: In an inpatient rehabilitation unit or independent rehabilitation facility, if you can benefit from being monitored by a physician and can tolerate three hours of therapy per day.
Depending on how serious your stroke is, you may stay in hospital for anything from a few days to a few months. You might move to a rehabilitation ward. You'll work with a team of health professionals specialising in stroke.
The length of stay in hospital after a stroke can vary from a few days to a number of months depending of the severity of the stroke and the support available at home.
About 70% of patients who receive rehabilitation following a stroke are discharged to home. The remaining 30% either return to acute care because of a complication or transfer to a skilled nursing facility, in some cases for continued rehabilitation services (Conroy et al., 2009).
According to the American Heart and Stroke Association, the best place to receive rehab is in an inpatient rehab facility or acute rehab unit. They help your loved one recover faster and return home sooner than other settings like a nursing home.
The 6-Month Mark and Beyond
After six months, improvements are possible but will be much slower. Most stroke patients reach a relatively steady state at this point. For some, this means a full recovery. Others will have ongoing impairments, also called chronic stroke disease.
For this reason, the 60 minutes after the onset of stroke symptoms are known as “the golden hour.” If treatment can be initiated within this brief window, the patient's outcome is likely to be better.
How Does a Stroke Impact Life Expectancy? Despite the likelihood of making a full recovery, life expectancy after stroke incidents can decrease. Unfortunately, researchers have observed a wide range of life expectancy changes in stroke patients, but the average reduction in lifespan is nine and a half years.
At the hospital, health professionals will ask about your medical history and the time your symptoms started. Brain scans will show what type of stroke you had. You may also work with a neurologist who treats brain disorders, a neurosurgeon who performs surgery on the brain, or a specialist in another area of medicine.
Some people can have 'Early Supported Discharge' (ESD) which allows them to leave hospital soon after a stroke, and continue to have the medical care and therapy at home that they would have been receiving in hospital.
It has been estimated that 10–20% patients with acute stroke require ICU admission [8,9,10].
End of life care
This can last for as long as it's needed, and can be days, months or longer. It should help the person live well for as long as they can, and die with dignity. It can include palliative care, which is holistic treatment and support to make someone as comfortable as possible.
You can expect to go home with new medications, rehabilitation plans and goals for keeping your risk factors, such as your cholesterol and blood pressure, in check. You'll need a good support network, and your caregivers, family and friends can help right away by modifying your home for better safety and convenience.
The main treatment for an ischemic stroke is a medicine called tissue plasminogen activator (tPA). It breaks up the blood clots that block blood flow to your brain. A doctor will inject tPA into a vein in your arm. This type of medicine must be given within 3 hours after your symptoms start.
As you begin to recover, you might feel that your behaviour changes or improves. You may start feeling better physically and emotionally. But some changes will be long term. You are still the same person, but a stroke may change the way you respond to things.
During the first few days after your stroke, you might be very tired and need to recover from the initial event. Meanwhile, your team will identify the type of stroke, where it occurred, the type and amount of damage, and the effects. They may perform more tests and blood work.
Strokes can cause weakness or paralysis on one side of the body, and can result in problems with co-ordination and balance. Many people also experience extreme tiredness (fatigue) in the first few weeks after a stroke, and may also have difficulty sleeping, making them even more tired.
Although just 10% of people fully recover from a stroke, 25% have only minor impairments and 40% have moderate impairments that are manageable with some special care.
Medical experts often use the NIH Stroke Scale to determine the severity of a stroke. Patients that score between 21 and 42 (the highest possible score) are considered to have suffered a massive stroke.
Even after surviving a stroke, you're not out of the woods, since having one makes it a lot more likely that you'll have another. In fact, of the 795,000 Americans who will have a first stroke this year, 23 percent will suffer a second stroke.
Few patients recover fully and most are left with some disability, but the majority exhibit some degree of spontaneous recovery. Doctors and scientists don't fully understand how this happens, because the brain does not grow new cells to replace the ones damaged by the stroke.
Mortality within 72 hours after stroke onset was 5.0% (32 patients) and a further 4.2% (27 patients) died within ten days. At discharge from the stroke unit, 63.9% of the 571 patients who survived went directly to their home with or without homecare and the other patients required further hospital based rehabilitation.
Immediate treatment can minimize the long-term impact of stroke: stroke can be disabling or life-threatening. During the first 24-48 hours, your doctors and nurses will be working together to stabilize your condition to prevent further worsening of the stroke and early recurrence of new strokes.
The first 90 days after recovery of a stroke are referred to as the 'golden period'. This phase is considered extremely important in the complete rehabilitation of a patient since most of the neurological recovery happens during this time.