What happens after a stroke?

So after a stroke, patients have a multitude of different courses. If they've been given acute therapies, whether it is with IV medications that break up clots or whether it is with stents and other things through the arteries to remove clots that are blocking arteries in the brain. If they've had those therapies and they have been successful, we know their outcomes are better. Even though they’re better, a lot of people will say, well what does that look like? And the answer is many times people have to go through rehabilitation and work with their physicians to modify some of their risk factors that they may have had, or not even know that they had, before their stroke - like high blood pressure, cholesterol problems, diabetes, and smoking - those types of factors. But often times rehabilitation works amazingly well for these individuals to heal and repair the circuits that have been potentially damaged after a stroke has occurred. This rehabilitation can sometimes last for weeks; sometimes it can last for months; sometimes it could last for days depending on how well their therapy works. Everything we do in stroke, if done quickly, if the patient arrives as soon as they possibly can, all of those therapies will lead to a much better chance that the patient will have a very short rehabilitation stint and have a much better outcome on the other side