Montel Williams
I Didn’t Think That I Was Going to Recover From This
Williams quotes “A few minutes
after 9 A.M. on May 30, 2018, Williams was in the middle of his third set of
dumbbell squats in the gym. “I was on about rep 15, and I heard this ‘pop,’”
Williams tells SELF”.
This past spring, typical workout
session for Montel Williams took a scary turn when he found himself having a
stroke in a New York City hotel gym. The television
personality and host is speaking out about his health scare in order to help
spark a conversation about stroke and stroke recovery.
“My first thought was, ‘There’s nobody in
this gym, so where did that noise come from?’ So, I look to the left of me
where I thought the pop came from, and there was nobody there," he says.
"By the time I turn my head back around in front of me, the whole gym
starts to kaleidoscope and I have this wave of exhaustion come over me.” The
side of his mouth started to droop and he began to drool.
Williams
realized immediately that he was having a stroke,
thanks to an episode of The Dr. Oz Show that he caught a couple months
earlier. “I thought, ‘Don’t tell me you just had a stroke. I just had a
stroke!’” Williams says. Feeling off-balance and barely able to move his limbs,
Williams grabbed onto the wall and made his way to the elevator and back up to
the 14th floor of the hotel, where his wife was showering in their room. “When
I walked in the room, I collapsed on the couch and I
called out to her, ‘Tara! Call an ambulance right now and tell them your
husband just had a stroke.'”
Fortunately
for Williams, one of New York-Presbyterian’s specially configured stroke unit
emergency vehicles was three blocks away when his wife called 911. They were
able to do a CAT scan immediately and video-chat with the hospital to determine
the right course of treatment (which includes blood pressure medication to stem
the bleeding). “A doctor appears on the video screen and says, ‘Mr. Williams,
you did have a stroke, and in fact it’s still ongoing right now,’” he recalls.
Williams ultimately spent 21 days in the hospital, beginning in
the ICU.
“I was
barely lucid, in and out of consciousness. The first five days [in the ICU]
were such a blur,” Williams says. “Most of what I remember from the first five
days is that every time I woke up, my wife was just right there saying ‘I love
you.’ And every time I went to sleep she was right there saying ‘I love you.’
And that's really what kept me going.”
The majority of strokes are ischemic, but Williams experienced a
less common hemorrhagic stroke, or bleeding stroke, which account for about 13
percent of strokes, according to the American Stroke Association (ASA). A
hemorrhagic stroke occurs when a weakened vessel ruptures, causing blood to
accumulate into the local area and compress the surrounding brain tissue, per
the ASA.
Williams’s bleed occurred
in a particularly risky area. Dr. Stieg says, “Not only did he have a
hemorrhagic stroke, but he had it in the back part of his brain, called the
cerebellum, on the left side”—which is a brain region responsible for the
coordination of body motion on the left side of the body. Because the
compartment where the cerebellum sits is very small, bleeding here can be
dangerous. “When you have an expanding blood clot, something has to give—and
that’s the brain. That’s where you get not only the primary injury from the
bleeding episode, but then you get a secondary injury because of the pressure
that the mass of the blood clot causes,” Dr. Stieg explains. “That's what makes
that a life-threatening condition.”
Although
many hemorrhagic strokes are precipitated by lifestyle factors—like smoking,
not exercising, not managing stress, or having chronically high blood sugar,
cholesterol, and blood pressure—sometimes they occur spontaneously in perfectly
healthy people like Williams, Dr. Stieg says. “It’s something that they call a
transient event, where it can come out of nowhere,” Williams adds. “I had
never, ever, ever in my life had a history of hypertension, high blood pressure,
nothing.”
In
addition to those lifestyle factors, genetic factors can contribute to stroke
risk. “It’s very prevalent in African American males,” Williams notes. He also
says that he may have had a blood vessel abnormality in his cerebellum. There
are several blood vessel abnormalities that can exist from birth and predispose
you to stroke, Dr. Stieg says.
Williams worked incredibly hard at his recovery.
After
nine days in rehab at New York-Presbyterian, Williams spent six weeks doing
intensive rehab at a facility two blocks away from his in-laws’ home in
Jackson, Tenn. The early progress he saw from putting a lot of effort into the exercises
inspired him to give rehab his all. “I noticed clearly, the third day of
walking with the walker, that if I paid attention and did the things they were
telling me to do, walking with that walker was a little easier.”
He
also did exercises to combat nystagmus, a condition in which the eyes move
involuntarily. “Both eyeballs were shaking like crazy,” he says. But he noticed
small improvements after a couple of days of visual focusing exercises. “You
get out of rehab what you put in," he adds.
Today, Williams is nearly
back at 100 percent. “He probably will always know he had this event, but he’s
near back to having a normal lifestyle,” Dr. Stieg says. “He’s worked really
hard on his recovery.”
“We’re so afraid to talk about stroke in this
country—we just don’t talk about it,” Williams says.
Part of changing
the way we talk about strokes is changing the way we look at recovery.
“Sometimes [strokes] can be devastating where people lose motor and speech
function,” Dr. Stieg says. “But many times they regain function, and [Williams]
is obviously an example of that … His is also a story of hope—which is the
story of stroke.”
Williams wants people to
understand that having a stroke or discussing the topic is not something to be
embarrassed about. "It is something that happens in society and there is a
way out of the depths of the darkest times,” he says.
Nearly
fully recovered, Williams has returned to work. Last week, he shot the first
episode of a show called Military Makeover: Operation Careers,
which helps place vets in the workforce. But make no mistake, he is determined
to take it easier these days, and spend more time with his wife, Tara. “As
committed as she has been to being my caregiver, I need to commit to her,” he
says. “I don’t want to miss out on another second with her.”
These days, he
doesn’t stress out about the little stuff. “I’m not overreacting to things.
What I screamed about three months ago, I’m not even slightly raising my blood
pressure over today,” Williams says. And he’s started incorporating naps into
his daily routine
BTMB
