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    Northwest Brain Network News

Connect with people who know what you are going through.

    Letter From The Director

For the past twenty years, Anne Tillinghast has had the good fortune to work closely with stroke and brain injury survivors. She spent fourteen years as a scheduler/receptionist in a stroke neurologists’ clinic, nine years as the leader of the Backstrokes Sing-Along, and the past three years developing the Northwest Brain Network along with an awesome team of survivors.

What I am grateful for this year:

For a long time, I was a person who could not tolerate silence in a conversation. Throughout my life, I have processed my emotions and experiences through talking. Often by talking a lot. Any gap in the flow of conversation made me nervous enough to express that discomfort by talking even more.

Working with stroke and TBI survivors changed that. In my role as a scheduler and receptionist at the clinical stroke center at OHSU, I started talking to survivors and family members on a daily basis, and quickly found that I needed to listen better so that I could understand their questions and know how to help. After some time, I became pleased with myself because I had become such a patient person.

However, one day on the phone with a patient with severe aphasia it suddenly dawned on me that I was not the most patient person in this conversation--he was truly the patient one. On that day, I learned to appreciate anyone who cared enough to take the time to get those words out. I am grateful for all that I have learned, and continue to learn from my friends and colleagues.

Please share projects or photos of what you've been up to with Anne at anne@nwbrain.network

    Meet Ed Edmo

Ed Edmo, long time Backstrokes member, with his wife Carol, is an acclaimed poet, performer, traditional storyteller and lecturer on Northwest tribal culture, consultant to the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, and recipient of a national Endowment for the Arts grant.

RAKING LEAVES

i raked leaves today

rake scraping asphalt

churning

memories hurting

gathering dead leaves

memories

pieces of old self

thrown away

brown memories

kept for

another day

I rake leaves

in a different way

From: A Few Words of Mine

New Drug Better Than tPA?

Researchers from The Ohio State University College of Medicine and The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center have developed a new stroke therapy that, when tested in mice and dogs, has proven highly preferable to the standard of care therapy now offered to patients suffering a stroke.

DTRI-03 works this way: Thrombosis, or a blood clot, is the leading cause of disability and death in the western world. Current agents used to treat these conditions are limited by a short therapeutic window, irreversibility, and major risk of hemorrhage. To overcome these limitations, we developed a novel drug, called DTRI-031, that selectively binds and inhibits platelet adhesion and arterial blood clots while enabling rapid reversal of this antiplatelet activity by an antidote oligonucleotide.

"We have shown that our drug, DTRI-03, is completely reversible and opens up a blocked blood vessel better than the 'clot buster' drug called tPA, which is the only drug used in stroke today. This outcome may result in the first new drug in more than 20 years to treat patients with stroke," said lead researcher Dr. Shahid Nimjee, an endovascular neurosurgeon at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center's Comprehensive Stroke Center."

Backstrokes Online Sing-Along

November 23, 2020

11:00 - 12:30

Singing, and playing and listening to music have been proven to help with recovery. And don't forget--it's also fun!