STROKES DON'T JUST HAPPEN TO SENIOR CITIZENS PATIENTS IN THEIR 30S AND 40S SHARE STORIES AT SUPPORT GROUP.

Byline: Evan Henerson

Staff Writer

Poe Tan was sitting at his computer last November when his life changed forever in a flash.

"I started feeling really weird, and my whole side just went numb," Tan, a 35-year-old animator for the Cartoon Network, recalls. "I told my wife, 'Something's going down,' and my speech started slurring really badly.

"I felt like I was a plane on fire, just going down. I had no control over my whole body."

Tan had suffered a debilitating stroke. He could no longer walk, lost feeling in his hands and had trouble with basic communication and motor skills.

In the ensuing eight months, he has moved from a wheelchair to walking with a cane. He attempted to return to his job at Cartoon Network but quickly decided the time wasn't right.

"I just felt like I wasn't 100 percent at the end of the day," he says. "Today, I still feel that kind of weirdness, the numbness in my ears, in my hands, in my eye sockets."

Colloquially referred to as a "brain attack," a stroke occurs when the flow of blood to the brain is interrupted. It's caused either by artery blockage or by bleeding into brain tissue.

Of the 700,000 people who suffer a stroke in the United States each year, some 28 percent are under the age of 65, according to the most recent data collected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the American Heart Association.

The same statistics say there are currently 4.7 million stroke survivors -- split nearly evenly between men and women -- currently living in the U.S.

Actress Sharon Stone suffered a stroke in September 2001, at the age of 43, and New England Patriots linebacker Tedy Bruschi had a stroke in 2005 at the age of 31.

For stroke victims in their 30s through 50s, life and recovery issues run the gamut from "Am I going to work again?" to "Will I drive?", "Can I live independently?" or "How do I prevent this from happening again?"

Some local residents are turning to a support group at Burbank's Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center that caters to young victims. The current regular attendees include Tan, film distribution executive Reiko Bradley, 47, and a 53-year-old TV sales executive.

Healthy competition

Tan and Bradley were in the medical center's stroke unit at the same time and have remained friends within and outside the support group. Still, Bradley confesses to nursing a competitive streak and having felt "left out" when Tan seemed to be regaining movement more quickly than she did.

"Which is stupid," says Bradley. "Because everyone has a different kind of stroke, and the severity is always different."

Organizer Cynthia Mascott is hoping the support group's ranks will grow to meet what she considers an acute need.

"At one point in the last month or two, I had three stroke patients all under the age of 45," she says, emphasizing that the group is open to all stroke victims, not just those treated at her facility. "It does seem to be a trend, and their concerns are so different."

Pamela Nye, clinical nurse specialist at the medical center, says people need to be aware that stroke doesn't just affect people in their 60s and 70s.

"We had a 24 year-old mother of two last year who was standing by her kitchen sink washing dishes, and she fell to the floor," Nye recalls.

Seven months after her stroke, Bradley is out of a wheelchair and walking with a cane. That's huge progress, she says, but she acknowledges there's still a long way to go.

"I really miss the little things," she says. "I'd like to be able to drive again. I'd like to have meetings with film distributors again, even the ones that drove me crazy. I'd like to run off and meet my girlfriends for a glass of champagne, the things I took for granted."

Long road to recovery

For Tan, "recovery wasn't just like walking out and everything is painted with flowers. It was really hard, and it's so easy for us to forget what we had."

With his wife Caroline due to give birth to the couple's first child later this month, Tan is taking time off to recover and consider his options, including a possible move out of state.

"You work in entertainment and live in a very high stress area. For me, it's deadlines and getting stuff done," says Tan. "I don't know if I want that in my life. Now I think I'm looking forward to a change of lifestyle, going somewhere where it's more of a slower pace."

John Mazur, the TV exec, returned to PSJMC on the one-

year anniversary of his stroke. When he learned of the support group, he elected to keep coming back.

Brain attack

In April 2006, Mazur was on the phone with a client from Sony when he suddenly seemed to lose the power of speech. He described himself as being "in a blur" for at least 20 minutes.

When he snapped back, Mazur went home and canceled a dinner date to go the gym instead, chalking up the entire experience to an allergy attack.

"I had already had the stroke, and I had no clue," he says. "I completely ignored it."

The following morning, he woke up knowing something was wrong. Mazur's wife took him to the doctor's office and ultimately to the emergency room at PSJMC. Mazur figures he had another stroke in his doctor's office.

At the hospital, Mazur recalls obsessively reciting the names of certain family members over and over again.

"I was writing them down. At that point, I couldn't write with my right hand, so it was like a caveman scrawl kind of thing," Mazur says. "I think the nurse was going, 'what is with this guy?' but whatever I was doing was right because I had to go through that process to make sure I remembered."

When he was ready to return to work, Mazur had his pick of a few different options. He wasn't interested in starting over but was reluctant to take on additional responsibilities.

"When you have a stroke, there is this kind of a little disconnect," he says. "I want to make sure I can do everything I'm telling people I can do. That's the one thing I'm not sure about."

Bradley is equally cautious: "I look fine on the outside. I talk like I'm fine. I sound the same. It's so hard for some people to understand that I'm still not OK."

Evan Henerson, [phone]

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CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1) Caroline and Poe Tan sit in their vintage VW bus. Poe, 35, was an animator for Cartoon Network when he suffered a stroke last November.

John McCoy/Staff Photographer

(2) no caption (Reiko Bradley)