What happens when you experience a Stroke before Pregnancy? Shri's birth story, Part I

In today's episode I speak with a woman who had her whole life turned around by an unexpected health crisis when she was in her early thirties.

She shares

*what she did to reclaim her health
* how it influenced her fertility and pregnancy journey
* the wisdom she gained in this effort to regain her health and her life
* insights from the ayurvedic approach to life

 What follows is the first part of our conversation

You can find Shri at her:
Website : https://vivabyshri.cohere.live/about
Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/vivabyshri/
Facebook Page :   https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61554924608066

Transcript

Paulette  0:02  
A welcome to what you didn't expect, fertility, pregnancy and birth, how we think and feel about this enormous transition often lives in the gap between what we expected and what we actually experienced. This gap exists in part because of how we tend to talk about and portray these events of all kinds of media in a one dimensional way. Everything is amazing, but it's more often the case. There are beautiful things that happen and at the same time, really challenging things that happen. This show shares true experiences, both the easy parts and the difficult parts, and how we manage what we didn't expect, the intense things that can happen in the course of this transition can impact how you see yourself, how you see your partner and how you parent. The better we understand what happened to us, the better we can manage all the things that follow. I'm Neros Paulette Kamenecka, a writer and an economist and a mother of two girls, and I met many, many challenges in this process, none of which I expected. In today's episode, I speak with a woman who had her whole life turned around by an unexpected health crisis when she was in her early 30s. She shares what she did to reclaim her health and how it influenced her fertility and pregnancy journeys. What follows is the first part of our conversation. Hi. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Can you introduce yourself and tell us where you're from? Where

Shri  1:22  
you're from? Sure. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Sri Shukla, and I am an integrative health coach, and I fell into this field of work by a sequence of life events that happened to me, and currently I'm focused on helping women prepare for pregnancies, and also I do emotional and mental health rejuvenation. My approach is really integrated in the sense that I draw from my 15 years plus of experience in the field of health social work, in which I have a PhD and I am also certified in Ayurveda. And so really, my approach is blended. I understand the medical world as we all experience it, but then I also understand Ayurveda, and I try to bring the best of the things together for it to work for the individual,

Paulette  2:22  
we'll get into this more later in our conversation. But if you're unfamiliar with it, Ayurveda is a 3000 year old Indian Medical System that seeks to maintain balance in the body and mind. It's based on the idea that disease reflects an imbalance or stress in a person's consciousness. It uses lifestyle interventions and natural therapies like diet and herbal remedies and massage to regain a balance between the body, mind, spirit and environment. This is so cool. I am excited to hear about how you're blending these different things. I'm interested to see how these things integrate. Want to hear the story of what happened in your pregnancy and how your life events affected your path? Yes,

Shri  3:03  
absolutely. So I was in the last year of my PhD program, and I am a huge meditator. So I was meditating on a Saturday morning after my breakfast, and I just sort of slept off during the meditation, and when I got up, I had four people in my room, and I couldn't recognize my husband anymore. I was very, very scared when I got up and I felt like I had been attacked or something wrong had happened. I couldn't make any sense of the room or the people in it, or what had happened. And I was taken to the ICU. How old are you here?

Paulette  3:47  
I was 32 years old. Okay, so young. You meditating. You feel like you've fallen asleep, but when you wake up, nothing makes sense.

Shri  3:55  
Nothing makes sense. My husband felt like something had drastically changed about me, and then I was told that I had had an ischemic stroke, and I was in the ICU for seven days.

Paulette  4:08  
So what happens in the seven days, once you get to the hospital, do you know what's going on, or you're still out of it? So

Shri  4:14  
for the first couple of days, I felt like the life out of me had left, and I could just vaguely understand the conversations that were going on around me. And I remember that there was a conversation about having a brain surgery, which terrified me a lot just lying on the bed. I was terrified just listening to,

Paulette  4:38  
well, that at least seems like irrational, right? Who wouldn't be terrified to hear that? Right? Just to be clear, for an ischemic stroke, that means a blood flow to the brain is blocked by a clot or something. It's like the brain's version of a heart attack. Yes? So they want to go in there and take out the plot, yes,

Shri  4:53  
they want to take out the clock. So there was consideration for a surgery. I couldn't talk, though. I couldn't speak at all. Even when I tried to speak, I couldn't really speak much. I could just, like, make signals and things like this. But somehow, I think, on the second or third day, they decided not to have a surgery, and then I felt truly relieved, because I could vaguely understand that they had dropped the idea of a surgery. So I was truly very relieved. And like anything else I can cope with if I'm not going to go through a brain surgery. My family was rushed from India, and, yeah, I was sent back home. And that's when I realized, over time, like I had completely changed, you know? So the first challenge that came up for me was that I couldn't read. I couldn't understand the written word. I could slowly start to speak. My speech returned to normal within, like, 15 days, or even earlier, it had returned. I could talk. I could understand things. So it was not the worst, but the written word made no sense to me, like ABCD was like cows and apples.

Paulette  5:58  
What does that mean? Your eyes didn't focus. You couldn't see it, or you just couldn't make sense of it. I couldn't make sense of it. I could see it. I can't believe you were only in the hospital for seven days. That feels like we need this room, or something that feels really fast to me. Did it feel fast to your family? I

Shri  6:12  
think in the I think in the world of strokes, my stroke was minor, and also I think that because I was young, physicians were very confident that I was going to recover very fast, which is not what happened Okay, and even though some parts of the healing did, some aspects came back, like I was able to talk, I was able to walk, but I was able to eat my food normally, but I was not able to actually make sense of conversation. So when I would see a movie, the dialogs didn't make sense to me. So we laugh about it now, but at the time, it was scary and terrifying.

Paulette  6:49  
Oh my god, yeah. And so what that means is that there's some part of the clock that's putting pressure on an area, like Broca's area, or something functioning, cognitive,

Shri  6:59  
functional gets terribly affected. So I couldn't make sense. I couldn't read. So you can imagine, I was just about to graduate, and I have an award winning PhD. That's my ability. And it was so hard hit that I couldn't read pages of regular books or something that a standard eight student, seven students could read,

Paulette  7:21  
I'm going to stop you for one second, because obviously, it's all it's all been brought back. You have climbed this mountain and gotten it back. But how terrifying? Oh, my God, that is yes, yes, terrifying to be plunged back into your life, in a in a life that you don't even recognize, because you can't inhabit what you inhabited before.

Shri  7:42  
Yes, oh my god, absolutely. And I had bursts of crying without reason, which were also terrifying for my partner, because he just didn't understand, why is she crying all of a sudden? And there's a medical term for that. I don't remember right now, but I would just cry for no reason, like everything is normal, and just sitting around as I burst into crying, and then I keep crying for half an hour uncontrollably. So those kinds of episodes happened for the next three, four months, but I then I started to do occupational therapy. I did a lot of occupational therapy work. And

Paulette  8:22  
what is also like,

Shri  8:26  
they teach you things to do on the computer. There are puzzles, and then there's physical things to be done, just hand eye coordination, coordinating things mentally also mental exercises, which looked like puzzles, but there's a lot of different variety in that.

Paulette  8:42  
So the idea is you can grow this, this neural network back, whatever absolutely,

Shri  8:47  
absolutely neuroplasticity was, what they were wanting to activate. And because I was young, I think I see that with a lot of compassion towards everybody. I mean, stroke is always scary, but just the amount of effort that I had to put it was a full time job. So it became a full time job visits to six or seven physicians, and then the occupational therapist, and then I did not meditate anymore, because that's what I was doing when the stroke happened. So I was very scared, but the reality is that actually, meditation is a very powerful tool to use for neuroplasticity. Yeah, and so I had to emotionally settle down with that fact, which my occupational therapist also helped me with,

Paulette  9:36  
Oh, my God, I would have to sit in someone's lap at that point to do meditation, just to have someone right there. Yeah, that's a lot of courage to go back to that, yeah,

Shri  9:46  
so I went back to it after a few months. Actually, it took me four or five months to go back to it, and I was able to defend my PhD, but, but what happened with me was there were parts so we had recovered, but there were parts of me that felt like I had, I had completely changed as a person, and I yearned for the year, the version of me that I was one year before. So there were lots of pieces of the puzzle for me, and there were some pieces of the puzzle, which were kind of apparent, because I had been told by my physicians that the stroke actually happened because the the birth control pill that I was on was incompatible with high blood pressure, and my high blood pressure had not been diagnosed.

Paulette  10:38  
Well, the high blood pressure is a really tricky one, because I don't think you can feel it right. No, doesn't feel like anything.

Shri  10:44  
It doesn't Yeah, and because I was not measuring it, I was not actually monitoring my blood pressure at the time, I also didn't advocate for myself at any level. So that's what I was told. So then I knew that, like it was a trigger. And also, three months before I had this talk, I actually had a very severe thrombosis, like pain in one of my legs, and it was a debilitating pain, debilitating. But I was at a conference in Washington at the time, and I sort of just tolerated it. I took a lot of painkillers. I tolerated it. It got better, and then I just forgot about

Paulette  11:21  
it. You thought it was like I pulled something in my leg, or,

Shri  11:26  
Yes, that's what I thought it was just a sprain or something that I put I hadn't felt before. But I think there is a relationship between how a thrombosis actually takes place in the body. And so that was one moment when I had actually visited a serious physician. They might have asked me to do a blood checkup, or something of the sort, so

Paulette  11:47  
that there was a blood clot in your leg, is what you're saying.

Shri  11:50  
I mean, they say that blood clots can actually move around the body, yeah. And so if I feel something in my leg, then it's worth to actually visit a physician, which I lost that opportunity as well. But then it became normal, so I forgot about it, and I went to the first round of my recovery, and I was given all the blood thinners and everything, and I I was at a fairly decent place. But the phenomenon that troubled me the most after even 18 months later was this post stroke fatigue. I was always feeling fatigued without a reason, so it was a kind of fatigue that feels so debilitating that one doesn't want to do anything, and it's just hard to get things done. And I was still working. I still had contractual work coming in, and I was still paying attention, but I was just not feeling sharp, yeah, and I was not feeling like I was thinking the same way that I used to, or I was hitting the same interior points that I used to. And so I just felt like a loss of myself that was very heavy. And so that's from meditation there to explore what else I could do to recover, and I wanted to be a mom as well. So I knew that the next step in life is going to be having a pregnancy, but I had so much fear. What else is my body going to do now,

Paulette  13:16  
you know, agreed and pregnancy is a stress test, so exactly

Shri  13:21  
it's, it's a big stress test, and so I knew that I have to, and they use the word balanced body in Ayurveda, right? And a lot of what comes in in Ayurveda is actually referring the recommendations actually come in for the balanced body. And that's where, that's sort of the origin of a misunderstanding of Ayurveda, because sometimes people say, Oh, that's an ancient system, and how does it apply today? So I do feel that Ayurveda is a very ancient system, and it has to be constantly brought back to context in our practice. No doubt about that. But also we have to understand the other many of the simple recommendations are already coming for the balanced individual. We are assuming that this is but most people are out of balance, and that is why we need small interventions which are tailored to that specific individual to understand what is out of balance and to what extent, and then we can bring it back to balance. But the idea of balance really struck with me. And then, because I have some I had some vague understanding of what Ayurveda is, I started to use some of their oils and just routines, like improving my routines and things like those. But then what helped me was actually Ayurvedic protocols and Ayurvedic herbs and living that way of life. And really I felt a difference very fast. I have been suffering from this for 18 months, or I don't finance, not perfect but, but I felt a difference within one month. Within one month, I started to feel like a fresher version of myself. So

Paulette  15:12  
one thing that's interesting, I think about your story, is way I understand Ayurveda is that it is a traditional Indian medicine. And the thing that's interesting about your story is that you hold kind of both sides, which is to say this Ayurvedic practice, which isn't likely subject to randomized, controlled trials, like oops, Western medicine is but then you also have this much more Western background in health, social work, yeah. So you have these two together, and how do you balance those? Well, conventional medicine has not solved my problems about all immunity, and so I'm willing to try something different. And with Ayurveda, I thought the cost of trying this and having it not work is pretty small, yes, like, I'm not taking chemo drugs to try to build whatever it is, right? It's like, yeah, herbs and natural stuff. And for sure, there are some natural things you can overdo, and that can lead to real issues. But yeah, like, you know, you were allowed to say yes or no things, right? So, did you do anything Ayurvedic before this period in your life? And you ever used it before?

Shri  16:23  
Yes, but in a very homely manner, like, you know, we use some herbs in the house and we use some like kitchen herbs and things like that, but not in the way to actually resolve a problem, okay, but I will answer your question about balancing both sides. So Modern medicine has a lot of diagnosis. Yeah, okay, we have labels. Ayurved has no labels. All the analysis is done on the basis of energy principles, vata, Pata, kafa, etc, but it is very helpful to me and to most practitioners. When somebody comes to me and they say, I have been diagnosed with Lean PCs. Okay, now I listen to that, and that gives me some idea of what this person might be experiencing. I will still give them questionnaires. I will still do my own interviewing. I will still go through my own processes to understand what's going on. But medical diagnosis gives me clues right now, not always, because more often than not, we do have a lot of conditions within our body that actually don't one will never get a label for them, and that's true for different types of insulin resistance among people we have pre diabetes for people who are obese, but there's pre diabetes and insulin resistance and slim people as well. And that's true for hypertension, and that's true for a range of conditions, which is just like PCOS as well, which is just hard to diagnose, and then through conversation and through understanding their diet, their lifestyle, how they are living, and how the energy around us is really affecting this one person, because they have their individual profile. They have their own profile, energetic profile, which we know from Ayurved. But then there's the context that they're living in, and how they're behaving and how that's affecting and there's the mental pieces as well. What? What are they thinking? How are they thinking about things? And so based on this, there's a variety of things we can come up with. Now, part of this, in our way, this very standard, and there are things we can do that we know we will work for a lot of people. And then there's a part of it which has to be more personalized for it to have efficacy. That's one side of things. The other side of things is, when people come to me, they have, there's a range of reasons they would come to me. One is typically that they have received a diagnosis of infertility. And I think that's a really interesting blanket kind of diagnosis, but in most belief is that there's a lot of underlying conditions that can be resolved which are acting as blockages to fertility. Before we call somebody that this is an infertility problem, right? So there is a classic case of infertility where there's blocked fallopian tubes, or there's a there's medically visible things we can see. But there's also this infertility, which is just happening because there's a lot going on in the body which is out of balance, and that can easily be brought back to balance by by increasing the strength of the body, by increasing the nutritional load in the body, by calming down the nervous system, by improving the routines of the individual, and doing it in a way that's personalized or tailored for them so that they can easily get pregnant. And this applies to men as well. So people who come to be they're already on medical taking medical drugs. They are on ephemera, on tumor and and things like these. And the thing I I would say to this is that do that, but do do this first and if it doesn't really work, then you can do that. And the other thing is that it doesn't protect against first trimester miscarriage, right? All of these infertility drugs are not doing anything for us when it comes to the first trimester. Protection can only happen when we have a balanced lifestyle, when they are pumping foods which are conducive to fertility, and we are living in a way that's conducive to fertility. And are you made these fertility process is very, very special. There are chapters and chapters written in the Vedas about how a couple should prepare for pregnancy, and that's why I talk about the trimester zero. Do the work prior. It's very helpful. Don't just walk into pregnancy, especially if you're early, if you're 35 and above, yeah. I

Paulette  21:01  
mean, one thing I like about what you're talking about is, and especially in the context of it, because I myself had infertility, and it's exactly what you described, which is to say, Western medicine approach is really morselized. It's like, let's look at fallopian tubes, let's look at uterus. And those things have to be looked at. So I appreciate that. But in my case, and in the case of many, many women, if you pass those tests and you're still not getting pregnant, they say, Ah, it's undifferentiated fertility. Good luck. I like Ayurveda because it is holistic, and it is looking at the body as a system, as opposed to my experience in conventional medicine, where it's much more broken down into the separate little pieces with no real examination of how those pieces interact with each other, which ultimately, you know you are in a body with all these things connected. As it turned out, in my case, I wasn't getting pregnant, likely because of an autoimmune problem I had but didn't know about. But that would not likely be caught in a conventional OB practice, because there's zeroed in on just the machinery of reproduction, and not all the things in the body that may interfere with fertility but aren't directly relating to it. So it sounds like you you follow this path yourself, because, having come from this really challenging medical experience, the idea of pregnancy is a little stressful. And so what did you do in trimester zero to prepare for pregnancy. Yeah.

Shri  22:23  
So because I was treating my stroke and preparing for pregnancy at the same time, I was doing two things simultaneously, and that's not the case for anybody I have met so far. None of my clients have come to me with a stroke story, and that's really nice. So it's very different. It was different for me. But what I would say is that first, I had to choose a different lifestyle, right? I had to make certain life choices, not just lifestyle, but life choices because I had an academic offer in a university, but being an immigrant and not having other family around my partner, IB, decided that with my health and everything, it would be better for us to stay together and for us to not do states, even though that would have been manageable under some other conditions. Yeah, and then I would have also pushed my pregnancy forward, because I wouldn't care in 3839 48 is doable. It's actually really doable these days. So I think it shifted the way I thought about life. That was one thing, but in terms of lifestyle, you know, I have micro habits which are actually stressful, like screen time or truly examining the way I was eating, for example, just the idea of cold foods. We eat cold foods all the time, and there's nothing particularly wrong about it. But when I practiced the warm food method, which in Ayurveda, thought it really made a difference. It makes it helps your body with the homeostasis. It helps with digestion. It helps with gut health, and therefore you feel better. When you feel better, you can do other things, for example, just like meditation or exercise, which I didn't do during my post stroke fatigue at all because I was feeling too tired to work out, but now I could work out because I felt better. And we need those micro things which work for us. And it was very helpful to understand that I'm very Kapha prakriti. Kapha is made of like earth and water, and it's very heavy, and it's in the way. It's static. It has a static quality. It has a heavy quality. And so it really suddenly made a lot of sense, because the typical Kapha profile is that these people will always be a little bit stout looking, and no matter how well they eat, they will never be as slim as like a Bata woman could be, or a Pitta woman could be. And so it was also just like coming to terms with these pieces about my physiology and my uniqueness in in my in the body type I have. It's also very helpful. And then the recommendations and being more aware of the microbiome habits. You know, we know those things. For example, if somebody has been giving spectacles for your eyesight, but you feel like you don't look good in them and don't use them, right? These are very tiny things, but paying attention is worth it. And because they add up, they really add up over time. So yeah, and I think I just live a different lifestyle. I think differently. I was very relaxed. I would make time out and makes more space out for my health and for my well being, because I truly emotionally felt that that was the route I was being offered in life. And I think that's that's a spiritual awakening of sorts as well, because sometimes it's very hard to come to terms with the life we imagined versus the life we actually have to live. I

Unknown Speaker  26:08  
want to stop my country

Paulette  26:10  
here for today on this last profound statement, let me repeat what she said, it's hard to come to terms with the life we imagine versus the life we actually live. This is true in many circumstances, definitely true for many of us with our experience of fertility, pregnancy and birth, tree's remarkable story of resilience moves fast past what are likely to be some of the hardest parts, all the waiting and uncertainty around recovery, going from writing a PhD thesis to a state which you can't even read what you wrote and Back to a version of the body you once inhabited. I appreciate her focus on the time leading up to pregnancy and her real need to consider her health going into pregnancy. Thanks for listening. If you like this episode, please share it with friends. We'll be back next week with The rest of Shree story. You

Unknown Speaker  29:40  
covid 19 situation.

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