SARASOTA – It was supposed to be the best time of her life. Caroline Goggin got married and just got back from her honeymoon.
“It was the morning of October 8; we were in the kitchen right here, and it was a normal morning,” Goggin said. “I was going to take a pan from the stove and put it into my dishwasher, and I lost my vision. Everything went black. I lost feeling in my left hand, and the thing that was so weird to me was that my speech was slurred, and I couldn’t talk anymore”
Her legs went numb and she couldn’t stand. Her husband Travis called 9-1-1.
“By the time the paramedics got here I was starting to get everything back; I could talk again; I could see; my feeling in my arms and legs was coming back, so it was really bizarre because that sensation only lasted three minutes or so,” Goggin said.
By the time she got in the ambulance, she says she felt okay.
“That’s what made the diagnosis that much harder because you never think you’re gonna hear those words,” Goggin said.
She was just 27 years old when doctors told her she was having a stroke.
“I just started crying because I didn’t know what that meant, but I did know that my life was going to be forever changed,” Goggin said.
She spent four days in the hospital and says her recovery was just as hard emotionally, as it was physically.
“You don’t realize how much that messes with you, and in my case, it left me with severe PTSD,” Goggin said.
And she wants other young people to know the signs because it can happen to you, too.
“I felt like I got a new lease on life from this because you do get a new perspective when you come that close to really losing everything,” Goggin said. “Until you go through that, you don’t understand how hard it is.”
Goggin said working out again was difficult because she would get horrible headaches, but she and her husband recently completed her goal of running a half marathon together.