A black nurse was released from the hospital with a fatal tear in her artery. His doctor called it a migraine.

• Ashanti Coleman, a nurse and stroke survivor, was discharged with what doctors called a migraine.

• She really had a torn and blocked artery and could have died if she hadn’t gone to another facility.

• The way doctors ruled out her pain, she said, is common among black patients.

• Visit the Insider home page for more stories.

Ashanti Coleman wished he could rip his head off. Over the past week, what had started as pain in the right side had become more and more persistent and intense. As a stroke survivor and nurse practitioner who works in a pain clinic, Coleman knew she didn’t suffer from ordinary headaches.

But in the emergency room in May 2019, Coleman said she waited several hours before being seen. Eventually, she was admitted with a diagnosis of “mini-stroke,” but spent days waiting for the attention of a neurologist to determine the source of her now severe headache.

When the doctor saw her, he did not ask about her pain or perform a neurological exam, Coleman said. Rather, he dismissed her as a headache and sent her back – despite the fact that he had treated her first stroke and therefore knew her medical history and profession. “It didn’t do anything for me,” said Coleman, who lives in Memphis with her husband and two children.

That night, Coleman woke up with excruciating pain in his neck. “I felt like something was tearing,” she said. So she went to another hospital, where she learned that her right carotid artery – one of the two main sources of blood to the brain – was ruptured and 50% blocked, and she needed it right away. ” emergency surgery.

It turned out that when doctors tried to remove a clot after her first stroke in 2017, they damaged that artery. It didn’t fully repair itself, creating Coleman’s tear, blockage, and symptoms.

“The entire right side of my brain was not getting oxygen and blood, which was causing these headaches,” Coleman, now 41, told Insider. “Eventually that tear could have gotten worse and I could have died.”

The story continues

In a partnership with the American Heart Association, Coleman spoke to Insider about her experiences as a two-time stroke survivor and black woman navigating the healthcare system. Even as a doctoral nurse, she says, she is prone to systemic racism that negatively affects care.

Coleman was 38 and in good health when she suffered her first stroke

When Coleman woke up one morning in 2017 with pain in the right side of his head and body, she brushed it off and went to Starbucks. Back home, however, “the headache kept beating, but persisted,” she said. Then her husband noticed that her speech was distorted.

In retrospect, Coleman says the symptoms were a “classic” stroke. But she was 38, maintained a healthy weight and good blood pressure, exercised regularly, and did not drink, smoke or eat red meat. “I was just a little bit in denial when the symptoms started because I’m like, ‘I’ve got nothing wrong with myself,’” Coleman said.

But then a sharp pain descended on her left side, the left side of her arm felt numb and tingled, and she lost coordination. “That’s when I knew I was having a stroke,” she said. His race and contraceptive drugs were his only risk factors.

At the hospital, she was quickly diagnosed with a stroke caused by a blood clot in the right side of her brain. Doctors gave him anti-clot medicine first and then tried to remove it, but it was small enough at the time to leave it in place.

She then began physiotherapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy to recover her lost function. At first, for example, Coleman couldn’t open and close her left hand on her own. “My mind was telling me to do it, but it wouldn’t, so it was so frustrating,” she said. “I couldn’t style my daughter, my hair, or my clothes.”

As some stroke survivors do, she also developed a stress that lasted for about six months. His sounded Jamaican. “My speech-language pathologist asked me where I was from,” Coleman said. “I was like, ‘I from Chicago.'”

But after more than two months of rehabilitation, Coleman was back to work as a professor of nursing at the University of Memphis. “I was determined to get back to working order as quickly as possible,” she said.

Coleman felt fired during her second stroke

Coleman isn’t sure why his second experience in the same hospital and with the same provider turned out so differently. But she knows she feels ignored and that pain overlooked by medical professionals is all too common in black women.

“I hear a lot,” she said, “that African Americans, and especially women, are just taken away from their pain.”

A 2016 study, for example, found that about half of white medical students and residents endorsed false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites, such as that black nerve endings are less sensitive and that their skin is thicker. In turn, they rated the pain of the black patients as weaker and made less specific treatment recommendations.

Coleman said her pain was left untreated at first because, as the neurologist told Coleman’s primary care doctor, “it doesn’t look like it’s in pain.”

“They assume that individuals don’t suffer because we don’t present ourselves the way they think we are,” Coleman said. “I wasn’t writhing on the floor. I wasn’t using profanity. But everyone’s pain is different.”

Coleman, who currently administers COVID-19 vaccines and works to publish research on women and cardiovascular disease, wants to teach his nursing students exactly that. “I hope to train them where they don’t look at a person like that skin color,” she said. “I hope they are looking at a person as a whole.”

She hopes patients don’t put themselves in a category either, as if they think that because they’re young and healthy, they can’t have a stroke. “I use my strength to keep moving forward and pushing forward and standing up for the interests of others,” Coleman said, “so that another young woman doesn’t have to go through what I’ve been through”.

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