HENRICO COUNTY, Va. -- Ashley McGuire's kitchen in her Henrico County home is full of photos, memories of her family and her teenage years in color. As she showed photos of her high school sweetheart and now her husband to CBS 6, she reflected on being 19, a teenager who was just getting ready to dive into the real estate business.
"I was just doing the typical, 19-year-old stuff," she said. "Had no problems, worked out, ate healthy."
But there was one day, that year when everything went dark. She was at her parent's home, planning a Mother's Day dinner with her father in their kitchen.
"All of a sudden, the whole entire room started to cave in on me," McGuire said. "I fell on our kitchen floor and was numb on the left side of my body."
She was unable to speak, unable to move.
Her father called 911 immediately, and in minutes, an ambulance was taking her to the hospital.
"No signs, no nothing, no migraine, no headaches, just very quickly how it happened," she said.
She later realized she'd had a stroke, caused by a blood clot.
Doctors called it a "fluke."
"To be honest, I didn't even know what a stroke was," McGuire said. "So, I was never thinking of a stroke and I didn't even know what the signs would be if I were to have a stroke."
It took about a year for her to fully heal.
"I was like, am I going to feel again? Am I going to be Ashley again? So it was kind of a really scary, extremely scary moment," she said.
Every year about 795,000 people in the U.S. have a stroke, according to 2020 data from the American Heart Association, about 10 to 15 percent of stroke victims are between 18 and 45 years old.
Women are also at higher risk of stroke, known to be the third leading cause of death among women.
"When I found out it was a stroke, I was like, I thought this happened to older people," McGuire said. "It didn't even occur to me that a stroke would happen to someone at the age of 19 or 20."
Now McGuire works alongside the American Heart Association, encouraging everyone to know the signs of a stroke, also known as FAST:
Facial drooping
Arm weakness
Speech difficulty
Time to call 911
She's also asking everyone to learn about their family health history, learning that her grandparent had a stroke only after she suffered one herself. You can learn more about strokes here.
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