By Kate Wighton
PUBLISHED: 18:48 EST, 3 June 2013 | UPDATED: 01:46 EST, 4 June 2013
Fallout: An MRI scan showing brain damage (in brown) after stroke
From the moment she woke one June morning, Jenny Morgan knew something was wrong. She felt peculiar, her face wouldnt work properly and her arms and legs were like lead weights.
When she tried to speak, her words were slurred, and she had a pounding headache.
Her husband Neil rushed her to hospital, where they waited in A&E for three hours, during which time one side of her face began to droop and she lost control of her bladder. Yet when she finally saw a doctor, he seemed focused on one thing: how much alcohol Jenny had been drinking.
He clearly thought I was drunk and kept asking how much Id had to drink, recalls the 61-year-old author from Solihull. I wasnt able to speak by this point, so couldnt remonstrate, but my husband told him repeatedly that Id had nothing to drink. It was still only around midday.
The doctor discharged her, handing Neil a cardboard bowl in case his wife was sick. Not satisfied with this, the couple went to their GP, who sent them to a different hospital, the Queen Elizabeth in Birmingham, where her stroke was diagnosed.
Jenny is not alone: charities warn that it is commonly assumed patients are drunk when they suffer a stroke this means diagnosis and treatment is delayed (and for strokes caused by blood clots, clot-busting drugs must be given within four hours to be effective).
Furthermore, they say that many of the hundreds of thousands of Britons living with disabilities caused by stroke, or disorders such as Parkinsons, also regularly suffer the humiliation of being wrongly labelled drunk.
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The agony of stroke victims who doctors dismiss as drun