Getting a Second Chance : Health: Garden Grove mom weighed the risks and decided to try an aggressive, experimental treatment for stroke victims. She’s glad she did.

If it was true that she might never walk normally again. If she would never be able to talk, to say so much as “good morning” to a neighbor. If she would never again have the strength to pick up her newborn baby and cradle him in her arms.

Then, risks or no, she wanted to take the chance, to try an aggressive new treatment for stroke victims.

It was noon on Aug. 31, a Tuesday, and Tracy Houston, 36, was lying on a gurney at UCI Medical Center. She had a pebble-sized blood clot wedged in a vessel in her brain, an inch above her left ear. She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t walk. Couldn’t so much as clutch a coffee cup.

But she plainly understood: If doctors treated her like a typical stroke patient--at most, administering a dose of blood thinner and offering little hope--odds were she wouldn’t get any worse. But she probably wouldn’t get any better either.

Dr. Larry-Stuart Deutsch, UCI Medical Center’s chief of cardiovascular and interventional radiology, however, gave Houston an alternative. If she gave the OK and let the doctors try an experimental procedure that would chase down the clot and zap it with a clot-buster drug, she could be as good as new within hours. Or she might lose more of her strength. Or the procedure might trigger a bigger clot, or cause internal bleeding.

The choice was hers: All she had to do was nod.

Which she did, gladly.

If it lives up to doctors’ hopes, the aggressive new therapy being credited with restoring Houston’s speech and most of her strength might eventually be used to help many of the 2,500 people in Orange County and the 500,000 nationwide who suffer strokes each year.

Houston, a Garden Grove mother of two and an air traffic communications specialist at Los Angeles International Airport, is one of only a few hundred patients nationwide who have received the treatment.

For decades, experts say, doctors have done for acute stroke patients what they’ve done for the dying: make them comfortable and wait it out. Conventional wisdom has been that an oxygen-starved brain suffers irreparable damage after only minutes, so there is no point in even trying further treatment. Doctors were also reluctant to probe and prod the brain--one of the most-sensitive, least-understood organs.

A small but growing cadre of physicians, however, has begun to subscribe to a new school of thought: If you act quickly--within several hours of a stroke--and dissolve the offending blood clot, the brain can recover.

“Historically, stroke is God’s way of saying, ‘You’re dead,’ ” said Dr. Ian Gordon, head of vascular surgery at Long Beach Veterans Hospital and a member of the stroke research team at UCI Medical Center. The medical center is one of a handful of test sites for the aggressive new acute stroke therapy using the clot-dissolving drug urokinase.

“The medical establishment has always treated stroke as the one thing it can’t do anything about,” Gordon said. “It’s the only one of the major diseases that we’re still treating in 1993 the same as we did in 1893.”

Strokes, the third leading cause of death in the United States behind heart disease and cancer, generally strike when a blood vessel ferrying oxygen to the brain gets blocked by a blood clot. Without oxygen, brain cells begin to perish, causing loss of speech and vision and/or weakness in the limbs. Most stroke victims are age 50 and older.

With the new approach, doctors intervene quickly, much like they do with a heart attack. They thread a splinter-thin tube into the labyrinth of blood vessels in the brain and pump the clot-buster into the clot’s core. As the clot breaks up, doctors chase each chunk and inject another dose of the drug.

In theory, the procedure has the potential to stop a stroke--literally--in its tracks and reverse the damage. But it also has a slew of potential side effects, not the least of which is bleeding in the brain.

“Everyone has been real cautious, as they should be, because you’re fooling around with the brain,” said Howard L. Lewis, director of health and science news with the American Heart Assn. in Dallas. “It’s still very much evolving.”

One problem in assessing the effectiveness of the procedure has been that, because most people who have strokes wait too long before going to the hospital, potential candidates for the treatment have been hard to come by. To date, UCI Medical Center has treated six patients, all of them women, according to Gordon and Deutsch. Two didn’t get any better, one got worse and three fully recovered, the latest being Houston.

Aside from her age, Houston’s case was typical. Two weeks after the birth of her second child, Patrick, she was standing in the kitchen when her mother asked her a question about Patrick’s medicine. When Houston didn’t respond, her mother asked again. Houston wanted to answer, but couldn’t. It was as if someone had snipped the cables from her brain to her mouth.

The right side of her face looked droopy and she became too weak to stand, slumping to the floor in a heap.

No time was wasted in getting her to the hospital. And once there, it didn’t take long for Dr. Deutsch to find the source of her trouble: a pencil-eraser-sized clot on the left side of her brain. Deutsch laid it out for her: She was an ideal candidate for the new treatment, but there were no guarantees and several risks.

“You have to be fair to people and tell them these are the possibilities,” Deutsch said. “It’s like walking across the street and getting hit by a car. . . . It’s unlikely, but I have to tell them about the cars.”

Houston’s husband, Bill, wanted to hear something slightly more reassuring, but she motioned for the consent form and managed to scrawl her name on the bottom line.

Sitting in her living room recently, she recalled how she felt at that decision-making moment. “I wanted to talk again. It was so frustrating not being able to communicate. I couldn’t imagine going through life like that,” she said.

Besides, “I had a new baby to take care of. I had to get better,” she said.

For now, she appears to have suffered no ill effects, except for some lingering weakness in her right leg. She and her doctors expect that to get better with time.

As for Deutsch and Gordon, they want to try the technique on another half-dozen patients before drawing any conclusions. The same is true for their colleagues around the country, most of whom are prescribing a healthy dose of caution with their optimism.

All Houston knows is, “I’m just thankful. There’s so many things I wouldn’t be able to do right now.”