Elise Sheridan had just returned from vacation and had put her 10 and 12 year old daughters to bed when her hand started tingling and she felt a headache.

It was early September 2019, and at 47, Sheridan was having a stroke.

“I’m fine,” she tried to insist.

But her husband James noticed that the left side of her face was sagging. He called 911. Sheridan was rushed by ambulance from their home in Wantagh to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Bethpage, then transferred to Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip, both of which are part of the hospital health system. Catholic.

“What she had was a life-threatening stroke,” said Dr Kimon Bekelis, president of neurointervention services at Catholic Health, who removed the clot that caused Sheridan’s stroke. , in an interview. Without proper care, “if she had survived this, she would certainly consider a life of disability.”

Anti-clot care

The quick and possibly life-saving care Sheridan received is the type of treatment that recently won the Good Samaritan and other Long Island hospitals Gold Plus awards under the American’s Get With The Guidelines program. Heart Association for Stroke Care, a voluntary program that tracks how well hospitals adhere to scientifically proven standards for stroke treatment, including how quickly they administer intravenous blood thinners.

This year, nearly every hospital on Long Island – 22 of 23, not counting the two mental hospitals in the area and the Veterans Administration facility in Northport – achieved this designation, indicating that they have provided referrals. fast, high-quality care for at least two years. , announced the association last month.

“We are pleased to recognize these Long Island area hospitals for their commitment to stroke care,” said Dr. Lee H. Schwamm, national chair of the association’s Quality Oversight Committee, in a statement. Hospitals that follow the guidelines, he said, “can often see fewer readmissions and lower death rates.”

Many winners on LI

Long Island has an unusually high proportion of hospitals adhering to the guidelines, with 96% of them achieving the designation. In New York State, 108 hospitals have achieved Gold Plus recognition. That’s 66% of the state’s 163 hospitals, according to figures from the American Hospital Association. Nationally, 1,450 hospitals have been recognized for Gold Plus stroke care. This represents 29% of the approximately 5,000 hospitals in the country.

The 22 Long Island Award recipients are all named “stroke centers” by the Joint Commission, the nation’s oldest healthcare accrediting organization. Four – Good Samaritan as well as North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, NYU Langone Hospital-Long Island in Mineola, and Stony Brook University Hospital in Stony Brook – are full stroke centers, the highest level of certification, which means teams brain surgeons and other specialists are available at all times.

“On Long Island there has been a really strong push at all levels” to provide high level stroke care, said Dr. Michael Guido, director of the Stony Brook Neurology Stroke Program and co-director of the Stony Brook Cerebrovascular and Stroke Center. at Stony Brook Medicine. The American Heart Association’s program, he said, encourages hospitals to track and report treatment data, and “show you’re doing the right thing for patients.”

Stony Brook Eastern Long Island Hospital in Greenport is not a stroke center and does not participate in the American Heart Association’s stroke program, according to Stony Brook. Stroke patients in North Fork are transported by ambulance or helicopter to other hospitals, or they are stabilized in Eastern Long Island and transferred, Guido said.

“The value of time”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 800,000 people suffer from strokes – blockages in the blood supply to the brain or bursts of blood vessels in the brain – each year.

In Sheridan’s case, the clot in his brain was too big to be treated with intravenous medication, Bekelis said. Instead, Bekelis performed a mechanical thrombectomy, threading instruments through Sheridan’s blood vessels to his brain to grab the clot and remove it.

When Sheridan arrived at the Good Samaritan, she couldn’t move the left side of her body, but that changed as soon as the clot was cleared, Bekelis said. “Obviously it’s very rewarding for us, but also, it says a lot about the value of time,” he said.

Sheridan, who owns an interior design business, said much of that night remained unclear. But, she said, “I remember, at one point, kinda waking up and hearing someone say …” congratulations, you did really well. “”