Congenital Heart Defect Led to Stroke

By Christian Millman

For Ted Rossiter, an active, healthy 40-year-old, a diagnosis of stroke was a big surprise.

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On a spring evening in 2006, Ted Rossiter of Des Moines ushered his young daughters upstairs to bed, kissed them good night, and turned off the lights. Then he felt an unfamiliar light-headedness. “There wasn’t any pain, just this strange feeling,” he says. He lay down, hoping it would pass. It did. He shrugged it off.
           
The next day, Ted drove to pick up an order of produce from a local farmer’s cooperative. He wrote a check and headed for home. En route, he got a call from the woman at the co-op—he had written the check out to the wrong person and wrote the wrong date, including the year. The rest of the weekend, he had difficulty following conversations with his wife, Colleen. Back at work on Monday, he could not remember the log-in for his computer, the combination of his gym locker, or his voice-mail password.

Multiple scans and several weeks later, Ted learned he had had a stroke. He had none of the traditional risk factors he associated with stroke: He was only 40 years old and was a lifelong runner and all-around athlete.

An answer came from an incidental finding on one of the scans—Ted had a patent foramen ovale, or PFO, a common congenital heart defect that results in a small hole between two of the heart’s chambers. Doctors suspect about 25 percent of people have a PFO, yet most never know it. Those with PFOs are more likely to have a stroke, and at a younger age.

Ted and Colleen researched PFO and found a medical trial that was looking at whether patching the small hole would reduce his risk of a future stroke. Ted had a mesh patch put in place.

Life slowly returned to near normal. In June 2007, Ted competed in an Olympic-length triathlon. He still has difficulty remembering names, but otherwise the stroke has left few marks.

“I don’t think about it as much as I used to, which is where I wanted to be,” he says.