Yolanda Maston went from an extraordinarily active and vital life to exhaustion and increasing numbness – seemingly overnight. She knew something wasn’t right… but she didn’t realize she was on her way to paralysis.
One day she was putting on a golf invitational event and the next she was in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Eisenhower Health. Her decline from an incredibly vital life to inexplicable numbness and creeping paralysis was certainly a shock. Knowing what to do about it was something else entirely. “One minute I’m golfing the next day I’m in ICU getting prepped for a major surgery that was going to change my life,” asserts Yolanda.
Yolanda went to her primary care physician, Gloria Engel, MD, Board Certified in Internal Medicine, for help. Additional disturbing symptoms became apparent: heaviness in her arms and progressive loss of manual dexterity. Fortunately, Dr. Engel realized this situation required aggressive care and called Farhad Limonadi, MD, a Board Certified Neurosurgeon at Eisenhower Neuroscience Institute. Although Yolanda had many important commitments, Dr. Engel stressed the importance of immediately seeing Dr. Limonadi for further investigation.
By the time Yolanda was at Dr. Limonadi’s office where her sister helped her complete her paperwork, she was barely able to walk and couldn’t feel her feet. “I was already getting paralyzed from the waist down,” Yolanda recalls.
Dr. Limonadi rapidly recognized the severity of her situation and the extreme need to take rapid medical action. “With spinal cord injury, the disease process may be a one-way street and symptoms can be irreversible,” he observed. “That’s why it’s important to remove the offending material, reinstitute blood flow and disrupt the disease progression process as soon as possible.” This meant immediate surgical invention for Yolanda. Dr. Limonadi performed an anterior cervical discectomy and instrumented fusion on Ms. Maston. You can judge for yourself how successful this was by viewing the video and listening to Yolanda’s story.
More information on what lead up to her spinal surgery, her experiences, good fortune in caring doctors and outcomes along with further information about Degenerative Disc Disease (causes, when to see a doctor, prevention) is available by reading A Narrow Escape from Paralysis (scroll to bottom of that web page to click on Yolanda’s full story).
Take a moment out of your busy day and treat your health as a priority. Watch as Yolanda tells her story in this Health Insights video blog post: A Patient’s Story: Yolanda’s Narrow Escape from Paralysis — share it with your friends and family, too. More great VIDEO information is also available for you at the Eisenhower Video Library. Do you also enjoy AUDIO? Visit the Eisenhower Audio Podcast Library as well!
U.S. News & World Report has released its prestigious annual hospital rankings. Eisenhower Health ranks #1 in the Inland Empire and #12 in California. Eisenhower Health was also rated High Performing in 20 types of care — the highest number of specialty recognitions earned by a hospital in the Inland Empire.
Click Below to Learn More About Eisenhower Health’s Accreditations & Recognition
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