As a healthy and active 28-year-old woman, Jai Wu never thought she was a candidate for a stroke. A Captain in the Army, Wu was serving in Afghanistan in 2019-20 when she experienced what she now knows were symptoms of a rare cerebrovascular disorder known as moyamoya disease. What made her diagnosis difficult to pin down was that her symptoms were coinciding with a torn muscle in her left shoulder. Because of her age and the injury, coupled with no family history of stroke or heart disease, medical professionals and physical therapists were chocking up the pain and paralysis in her arm to that injury.
“I had more than ten months of symptoms with no idea what any of it was. I didn’t even google symptoms because I was being told it was nerve damage,” Wu told me recently. Then in July of 2020, during the height of COVID, Wu came back to the States and more severe symptoms began to emerge.
According to Wu, “I knew something was seriously wrong when I was driving, and my head snapped backwards, causing me to black out for a brief second.” She added, “I knew then that my issues could not be related to my shoulder, and I really began to advocate with local medical teams including a neurologist.”
After MRI’s confirmed there was a tangle of tiny vessels at the base of Wu’s skull indicating moyamoya disease, they also could see the evidence of past TIA’s (small mini strokes) she experienced while in Afghanistan. The name “moyamoya” means “puff of smoke” in Japanese and describes the look of the tangle of tiny vessels formed at the base of the brain to compensate for blocked arteries.
Two years later, Wu has undergone two cerebral bypass procedures and has become a major advocate for education about stroke, especially rare diseases. “You know your body best, so advocate for yourself. If I hadn’t said anything, I would have suffered a debilitating stroke.”
Wu was recently selected as an American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women’s Real Women and as one of ShowCase Magazine’s Women who Inspire.
For Additional Information
goredforwomen.org
LYNN CASTLE