When Borderline Becomes Breakdown: Choose Health Before It Chooses For You

In this powerful episode, a certified Health Coach shares her personal story of surviving a major ischemic stroke in her 40s—and the subtle warning signs she wishes she’d never ignored. Speaking directly to women over 40, she breaks down the early stroke symptoms that often get brushed off as “stress,” “being busy,” or “just getting older,” and explains how women’s stroke signs can look different from men’s.

Drawing from her blog articles on early stroke warning signs, silent stroke symptoms, and stroke prevention for women, she walks through:

• Early red flags women commonly miss, like sudden fatigue, confusion, vision changes, or unusual headaches
• Silent stroke symptoms that can quietly damage the brain without dramatic, movie-style stroke signs
• Key risk factors for women over 40, including blood pressure, hormones, lifestyle, and family history
• Practical prevention strategies—from daily habits and nutrition to medical checkups and advocating for yourself in the doctor’s office

This episode is part personal testimony, part wake‑up call, and part action plan. It’s designed to help women recognize when something isn’t right, take their symptoms seriously, and protect their brain health long before a crisis hits.

Note: This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice. Listeners are encouraged to speak with a qualified healthcare professional about their own risk and symptoms.

Article Reference:

Early Stroke Warning Signs in Women Over 40 

Silent Stroke Symptoms in Women: What You Might Be Overlooking 

Stroke Prevention for Women Over 40: The Complete Guide to Protecting Your Brain

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Brain Health & Stroke Prevention Specialist | DNA-Based Precision Wellness

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Transcript

Welcome And Health Disclaimer

Why I Went Silent

What A Stroke Is

Beyond FAST: Atypical Symptoms

Risk Factors You Can Change

Diet Reality Check

Shock, Stress, And Unclear Causes

Small Habits That Protect You

Managing Stress In A Noisy World

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Welcome to, you know, I'm not going to call a number, but I'm going to say welcome to an episode of 24-7 Health News hosted by Health Coach Shay. So these topics are from my blog, usually, at 24healthnews.com or topics that I think are important to health and fitness. Because these topics are important to your health, I try to break them down so that you can apply them to your daily life. Again, I'm Health Coach Sherry. I am a master trainer and a holistic health coach. Now, my information is not meant to prescribe or be taken in lieu of a discussion with your doctor or healthcare professional. You should always speak to your healthcare professional before making nutrition or fitness changes. I'm a health coach, and as such, I am making recommendations only in that capacity. So let's get started for our topic for today. So today, this topic is a little different because it's about where have I been and why did I disappear. So, you know, it's been a difficult, I don't know, I haven't done a podcast for probably for a year and a half or so. So it's been a little bit of a while, and um it's kind of difficult to talk about. So briefly, what happened to me was I had what's called an ischemic stroke. And I forgot to pull up the one and tell you what that is. So it's a stroke, evidently, it wasn't fatal, because I'm here talking to you. Um so what a stroke is in general is it's when the blood flow to the brain is interrupted, leading to brain damage. Um, and you gotta be quick when it happens. So um, and it's there's a couple of different kinds, and the ischemic stroke is caused by a blood clot blocking flow. The hemorrhagic stroke, the one that's scary, well, they're all scary, but this one is scarier, is caused by a ruptured blood vessel. So uh you really have to be careful uh once you have one, and you have to pay a lot of attention after. Um, the funny thing about it is, and I say funny as if that's a great word, um, the thing about strokes are they don't have any signs. Um the interesting thing for me was I got all the different types of uh warnings that you can get. Um a lot of times I see stuff online that says that strokes uh don't really have any um serious warnings. That's true because you don't know, they can come on all of a sudden. Uh they have this little I'll I'll go over this, the the standard stuff. It's called fast, fast the for the signs. Your face is dropping, your arm is weak, your speech is difficult, it's time to calm out. Um so I didn't have any of that. I had a headache uh for a couple of days, and then I got vertigo. Completely different stuff from what I just said, right? So that's why I would say you have to be very careful about that. What leads up to strokes um uh is the thing that's really scary. You can't be borderline on something for too long. And what I'm talking about is your blood pressure, your blood sugar, your cholesterol. You gotta get that stuff down immediately. Um, you can't mess around. You gotta work out, you gotta change your lifestyle. Um, high blood pressure smoking, smoking, diabetes, smoking, uh, high cholesterol, and a sedentary lifestyle. Now, or a poor diet. Um, I think that's where a lot of us fail is our our diet. We don't know how to eat what we like in a more healthier way. Like I could eat a piece of fried chicken every day, right? I I love fried chicken. I could eat it every day. That's not something I can eat every day. I gotta eat some baked chicken. Um, I gotta eat some fish. Uh I can't eat the abundance of steak that I would like to eat all the time. You know, you have to watch about, you gotta watch all these stuff, things because they lend itself to you having some sort of heart or stroke or both situation. So when this happened to me, of course, I was shocked. Um it is certainly a um a stressful situation. Um get your health, and it is a a um a frightening source for you to try and figure out now how to fix what's broken, and you don't necessarily know what's broken. It's my understanding that somewhere like 75% of the time, they don't necessarily figure out what exactly caused a stroke. You know, sometimes they have some direct correlations and sometimes they don't. Uh so I'm in the sometimes they don't. Um, I had a bunch of borderline stuff. Um the next thing I know, I was on the floor crawling around trying to figure out what's going on. So be very, very careful about what you do with yourself as far as all of those things, your diet, regular exercise, stress management, and all that kind of stuff, because I had a big old bucket of stress as well. Um, I want you all to remember that when we talk about these, I want to drag you back to one of my first episodes. There's 10 small things you can do that will greatly reduce your um possibility of a stroke, of heart, heart disease, and um all of these different things. A little bit of exercise, a little walking. And when I say walking, I'm not saying set out, take time in your day to to go for a walk, but you should. But I'm saying park on the other side of the parking lot and walk to where you're going to get your steps. Um, do that and move, and you'll find that you're halfway through a step count for the day. Park somewhere far from your where if you're going to the grocery store, take some extra laps in the grocery store. That will get your stress in. Stress management is a really difficult one for a lot of us because the way the world is today, you know, we're looking at our money, we're looking at all these different things, and you have to be careful about how much you take on. Shut the TV off, don't watch the news, maybe don't scroll as much, or find some funny stuff to watch on on Instagram. Because that's what I do. I switch. You know, when it gets too heavy on Instagram, I start watching puppy dog videos or baby videos or cat videos and laughing and things like that. You know, I have some other stress relievers, but that is really, really important. Um, what I have to say, I guess the big thing at the end of all this, because I'm gonna tell you about the rest of the stuff going on in just a second after I finish covering all this stroke stuff, is that when you don't take care of your health, it will take care of you. And everybody says that, and um, they don't really, really put it in their mind at the end. And I'm a perfect example. You know, like I said, everything was border, I was moving along good, I had plans, and everything squared away. My timeline was drastically moved up uh for retiring and whatever else I was thinking about doing, all that stuff had to stop first, and I had to recover, which I am still absolutely doing, and I had to re-jigger my whole entire life, which I'm still not finished doing. So, yeah, to think about it. I mean, even to come back here and speak to you all, um, I had to practice, practice, practice to get my pace where I felt comfortable with it, to get my voice where I felt like it was at a good level. A lot of stuff changed. It took a lot of time for me to work on how I speak. You can tell the tone difference if you listen to my other podcast. I'm down a little lower, I'm down a little slower, because I have to be, because I have to make sure that I'm still speaking clearly. And this took a lot of time to before I could feel comfortable coming back. So I am working and continuously working and to feel okay about speaking. Uh, whereas before I was comfortable speaking in front of people and throw me in there, I'll I'll try it. I didn't care. But now it's it takes some time. So I want to continue doing these health uh podcasts. Um, I'm not talking too much about the state of the union because it's a hot mess, and there's enough people talking about it online as far as I'm concerned. Same thing I felt about COVID. Um, so I will be talking about the health-related stuff because you need your health to deal with everything else right now. So, in that um, in that vein, remember, um, I've gotten I got some great sponsors. I have Sage Life Therapeutics, vitamins, and supplements you can check out, and they're all good for you. They all come from a healthy place, which I have definitely had to examine these days. Um, again, I have 24-7 health news, which I uh curate all the articles from all over the place for that for my blog, so you get a lot of good stuff there. And I have a new one. I have my healing 365, which is a telehealth group. It is an awesome, awesome telehealth group. Um one of the things you have to remember is we are fatigued, we don't like to go out. Shoot, going out is a little dangerous these days. So I love telehealth, I love all things online anyway. Uh, but this group is um primary care, urgent care, women's health, uh weight loss, um, mental health. It's everything. So it's a great sponsor for me, and they are a great, great group. Uh, one of my other sponsors is Seych Merchant Services, a great group of folks who help local businesses, um, you know, take a look at how they're processing merchants and try to find a way to save money. So that's my group. Now, at the end of this, uh inside the description for the podcast, there's a little support the podcast link. I'm gonna urge you to use that. Uh buy me a cup of coffee or donate whatever you like. So thanks again for listening. And coming up on the new podcast, the next episode. I don't decide whether I should start back at one yet. I guess it's been long enough. So coming up on episode one, because this is the prelude, we'll be um we'll talk about those GLP ones that everybody's talking about. Um, I watched Oprah on TV, I watched another lady on the view today talk about health and and and weight loss and what you need, what you should think about when you get ready to use these. I'm not saying they're good or bad, I'm just gonna give you some facts, um, and we'll talk about it from there. All right, everybody, thanks for listening. This podcast is going to steer our uh steer our discussions towards you know, science and medical help and all of the stuff that's out there. I also have another episode coming up that is about after stroke stuff. What do you do? That'll be a lot of my experiences, some articles I've also picked up. I think they've already posted, so I'll go back to them as well. So again, thanks for listening. Have a great day.