“I was completely unaware that I’d had a stroke.” says Stuart. “I assumed everything worked on my body, but it just didn’t”.

It was around 5 o’clock in the morning when he crashed his car, shortly after setting off for work.

A passer-by phoned for an ambulance and Stuart was taken to nearby New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton, where it was confirmed he had indeed suffered from a severe stroke.

“His face had fallen on the left side,” says his partner Sarah Gutteridge. “He couldn’t move his arms or legs and his speech was slurred.”

After failing to respond to clot-busting drugs, Stuart was transferred to a hospital an hour’s drive away, where doctors were able to perform a mechanical thrombectomy, to remove the blood clot.

When Stuart went  to hospital, he was found to have a large stroke which actually caused blockage of one of the main vessels of his brain. “We all know for every minute you delay there are millions of brain cells which are at risk. You need to act quickly to get a better result for the patient.”, his doctors says.

The doctor decided to perform a mechanical thrombectomy beginning  by inserting a tube into the groin, which goes all the way up to the main blood vessels in the neck and into the brain.Through the tube a stent is placed into the clot in the brain and then the clot is extracted by pulling this device out.

Pointing at Stuart’s scans, the procedure lasted just twelve minutes.

“We managed to get the clot out and open up all the vessels in the brain. A very good result.”

Stuart was overwhelmed with the result, and the speed of the success: “I was home the following day. As soon as I had the operation, it was just normal. Everything worked.”

And his partner Sarah couldn’t believe the success of the operation: “How somebody can go from not moving their left side of their body at all whatsoever, to going home the next day, was just incredible”, says Sarah.