- Jordan Plunkett suffered a stroke in June 2019, but clinicians thought she had MS.
- She was bedridden and in severe pain most of 2020 before getting a proper diagnosis.
- After a spinal surgery that may have saved her life, she's relearning to walk and sharing her story.
Jordan Plunkett was celebrating her 29th birthday with a trip to New York City when her left eye started bothering her. "Man, I really do not take good care of my contacts," she said she thought, and moved along with her itinerary.
A few months later, in spring 2019, Plunkett said she became "massively heat intolerant"and started zoning out on walks with her husband, Brad, but she kept it to herself.
Plunkett chalked it up to exhaustion from being an overachiever who poured herself into her job in social media creation for a bridal company.
Then, in late May, she collapsed on her way in from her building's pool, hitting her head on a storm door on the way down. Still, she convinced herself and Brad she had just overheated and didn't need to go to the doctor. That decision, Plunkett said, "would later be my undoing."
Her breaking point came a month later, when she was hit with an excruciating headache. When Brad looked at her, he panicked. "My eye looked like a squished grape," Plunkett said. "It had completely deflated."
Finally, she went to the ER, where she lost all vision in her left eye and became paralyzed on her left side.
Doctors suspected she had multiple sclerosis, which can cause vision, sensation, and attention problems. But they didn't look into the cause of her symptoms further, Plunkett said.
"I think it was very convenient to be 'close enough' and just put a pin in our story," she said of her original neurologist.
After enduring more than a year of immobility, pain, and feeling like "a guinea pig" in the medical system, Plunkett sought a second opinion — and learned she didn't have MS but had suffered a stroke. She's now regaining her ability to walk.
"Standing up to your doctor is not an easy thing because you have given them your trust to help and heal you, but if something doesn't feel right, then chances are, something isn't," she said. "I know what it is like to have the absolute fear of starting over, but at the end of the day, that second opinion saved my life."
Plunkett spent the better part of 2020 in pain in bed, on ineffective treatments
Before seeking the second opinion, Plunkett went through two months of inpatient care and a month of outpatient treatment, then eight months of occupational and physical therapy. Then the COVID-19 pandemic shut it down. And yet, she was only getting worse.
For the better part of 2020, Plunkett remained in bed with "excruciating head pain" 24/7. Her meds were changed seemingly at random, and getting in touch with the neurologist was "nearly impossible," she said. Barely able to move, she gained nearly 70 pounds and developed two stomach ulcers, on top of brain fog and severe sensory overload issues, which she still experiences today.
"Loud noises feel like someone is inserting a pick axe to the base of my brain," she said.
Another neurologist discovered Plunkett didn't have MS, but had suffered a stroke after she collapsed
By early 2021, Plunkett requested a referral to another neurologist, who took four hours to hear her story, validating that she hadn't been initially evaluated properly. New tests revealed each of Plunkett's "zone out" moments were transient ischemic attacks, or mini-strokes, which can be harbingers of the real deal.
Plunkett learned her collapse that Memorial Day had caused a head injury and cerebrospinal fluid leak that exacerbated her stroke risk further. That night in June, she'd suffered a stroke, the new doctor told her. She still doesn't know the root cause.
"Nobody ever thinks anything catastrophic could ever happen to them, but I'm living proof that it can," Plunkett said.
Women are more likely to have, and die from, strokes, according the American Heart Association. About 10% of them occur in people younger than 50, and the risk goes down the younger you are, Dr. Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, AHA's president, previously told Insider.
Time is of the essence when it comes to recognizing stroke signs. "Minutes matter in terms of saving brain tissue and brain function," Lloyd-Jones said. For Plunkett, minutes became months became more than a year.
'You have to keep going'
Plunkett underwent spinal surgery to plug up the CSF leak, which can be life-threatening and lead to meningitis.
She continues to regain her ability to walk, thanks to a device that uses electrical stimulation to activate her leg's nerves and muscles. While she discovered it in rehab for what was then believed to be MS, Brad's coworkers later gifted her her own.
"If I had never learned about it in therapy I would still be 100% bound to a wheelchair," Plunkett said. "This device gave me a better quality of life, and has truly changed my life forever. "
Plunkett says most people tell her they could never persevere if they were in her position, but she insists they would.
"If you would've asked me on June 22nd, the day before it all happened, I would've been like, 'No, absolutely no, never would I be able to do that,' but anyone would. You would have to keep going," she said.
"You would wake up just like everyone else, and you would start your day," she continued. "That day to you may look quite a bit different and quite a bit harder or more painful, but you have to keep going. And that's what I did."