“Oh, my, I’m in the hospital. What happened?” That’s what Gerardo Cahue wanted to ask his wife when he woke up in the intensive care unit at Riverside Medical Center. But his mouth couldn’t form the words. Cahue would later learn that he’d had a stroke. Nearly two days earlier, Cahue had started his early morning supervisor shift at a manufacturing company when he suddenly collapsed. “I fell, like a piece of wood, to the floor,” says Cahue, 64, of Frankfort, as he recalls the April 2024 incident. An ambulance rushed Cahue to Riverside, whose emergency stroke team and a neurologist determined his stroke was triggered by a clot. Cahue received medicine to dissolve the clot that was blocking his brain’s blood supply. Giving this specialized medication quickly can help reduce permanent disability. “All the team in the room at the moment did an amazing job,” Cahue says. Road to recovery After his stroke, Cahue began inpatient rehabilitation at Riverside. Over the next few weeks, he underwent extensive physical, occupational and speech therapy, provided by a “great team,” he says. He regained the use of the muscles he needs for speech, as well as other physical abilities. After his hospital discharge, Cahue continued rehab three days a week, from June to October, at Riverside’s Frankfort Campus Physical Therapy, just five minutes from his home. “He still had a lot of deficits as far as his dayto-day function,” says Cahue’s Riverside physical therapist, Alex Denklau, DPT. “A lot of what we focused on, especially during the first part of his rehab, was trying to help him regain the movement and motor skills of his larger leg muscles. We helped him do the simple things that a healthy person may take for granted—even just getting up and being Coming back from a STROKE Riverside helped Gerardo Cahue survive and thrive
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