Debilitating stroke won't deter MSUM senior from graduating

Written by: Glenn Tornell advocateSPAMFILTER@mnstate.edu

Thursday 21 April 2005

It was a sunny fall day when 21-year-old MSUM sophomore Krista Ott drove home after paying a few bills on the Internet at the Fargo Library.

“I just wasn’t feeling right,” she said. “I wanted to get back to my apartment and sleep before going back to class.”

But she only made it a few blocks, before hitting a parked car near Broadway, then backing up and hitting another car.

Although she was a college rugby player in peak health, Ott had just had a stroke.

The next day, after six hours of brain surgery, she awoke at the Mayo Clinic’s St. Mary’s Hospital. The left side of her body was paralyzed.

“I couldn’t do anything,” she said. “I couldn’t stand, swallow, walk, sit up or remember what happened.” While the MeritCare LifeFlight helicopter flew Ott to the Mayo Clinic, a Fargo emergency room physician informed her father in a telephone call that his daughter was in a deteriorating coma.

“He asked me about organ donations and life support and told me to be ready to make some difficult decisions,” her father, Marvin Ott, said.

But ultimately, Krista was the one who made the most difficult decision.

Now, three years after her debilitating stoke, Krista will receive a degree in mass communications on May 13.

“I want to close this chapter of my life and move on to a new one,” she said. “During my recovery, I’ve seen so many hospital patients who need encouragement and hope. That’s how I’d like to use my degree.”

The stroke wasn’t her first experience with the Mayo Clinic’s emergency room.

“When I was an MSUM freshman, I worked the late shift on the Campus Security staff and stayed up late studying for a math exam,” she said. “While I was taking the test, I kind of yawned and stretched my arms.

The next thing I know, I’m lying on the floor with 50 students and the paramedics looking over me.”

She had a grand mall seizure caused by an arte riovenous malformation (AVM), a relatively rare short circuit in the blood vessels of her brain. A congenital disorder, it increasingly puts pressure on the brain’s arterial vessels, which may eventually lead to a stroke.

That summer, Mayo Clinic neurosurgeons were able to remove about a quarter of the AVM, but decided not to exercise the entire tangle because of the potential risk of more severe brain damage.

“The doctors said I’d live a normal life and everything would be fine,” Krista said. “Little did I know that it would eventually turn my life upside down.”

Following her life-threatening stroke, however, surgeons removed the entire AVM.

“At that point,” her father said, “the doctors told me there was nothing to lose.”

The traumatic experience for her parents began when the county sheriff’s car drove up to their doorstep 14 miles outside of Grand Rapids, Minn. He informed them of Krista’s situation and an intense by a tense five-hour drive to Rochester followed.

“Thank goodness our pastor volunteered to drive us,” her mother, Mary, said.

At 2 a.m. that morning, doctors allowed her parents, along with her brother and sister, into the recovery room.

“I was in shock,” said her mother, who works in a Grand Rapids clinic. “There were tubes and equipment attached all over her. She was bandaged like a mummy, and she was so swollen from the surgery. The incision in her head was sealed with more than 50 staples.”

The next morning, Krista’s boyfriend, David Roberts, also an MSUM student (they’re still together) and 10 friends from MSUM arrived at the hospital to visit Krista.

“The doctors, both in Fargo and Rochester, were tremendous and encouraging,” Krista’s mother said. “But with brain surgery, they just couldn’t predict what the outcome would be.”

With her mother at her side throughout, Krista remained in intensive care for a week, then began a grueling therapy routine for the next three months, both in the hospital and as an inpatient at St. Mary’s.

Therapy involved a minimum of eight rehabilitative sessions a day, ranging from physical and speech to vocational and cognitive therapy.

“I even had facial therapy because when I smiled, only the right side of my face reacted,” she said. “But I was determined to walk out of the hospital on my own, without a wheelchair.”

On December 12 2004, she did just that, using a leg brace and a cane.

The following week, she was back in Fargo, working with MeritCare doctors and therapists to continue her recovery.

“There was no question about returning to MSUM to get my degree,” she said. “Fargo-Moorhead had become my home, and I was determined to finish college. Actually, I didn’t have an alternative.”

Krista’s academic adviser, Susanne Williams, described her as “strong, spunky and a fighter. She really didn’t want any help from the university.”

Returning to campus with a leg brace and a cane was awkward for the former athlete. But within a year she was walking on her own.

“I needed some help in my computer classes,” she said. “Hitting option-click is difficult if your left hand doesn’t work well.”

Last fall, Ott finally got her driver’s license back. “That was the hardest part for me,” she said, “not being able to drive myself around, depending on friends and the bus.”

Since returning to MSUM, some tingling has returned to Krista’s left hand and leg—the first signs that nerves are beginning to repair themselves.

“I’m in a wedding this summer,” she said, “and I’m determined to have that left hand back to normal.”

Krista describes herself as persistent in her recovery from the stroke. An unused wheelchair that sits in her parents’ house is a testament to her recovery.

But not unexpectedly, she did lapse into despair, on rare occasions.

“I was one of Krista’s cheerleaders throughout the ordeal,” her father said. “But I remember one day we just sat in her hospital room and cried together. I felt so inadequate and didn’t think I had the strength of character she had to overcome so much.”

He has, however, noticed a marked difference in his daughter.

“She certainly is more mature now,” he said. “Once you’ve been to the edge like she has, it gives you a better perspective on life.”