Stroke Survivor Blog

With the hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) sessions completed, we have the results of 18 treatments on my husband Steve, a stroke survivor. Although I had hoped that he could have received the recommended 40 sessions in order to get the maximum benefit, we have still seen improvement in the few that he got.

These are the results based on my observation and Steve’s feedback:

• He has no more “pins and needles” tingling in his arm or hand, although they are still sensitive. Occasionally he’ll feel that tingling in the palm of his hand, but that happens only when his hand is clenched and his fingernails dig into his palm.
• He has greater arm/shoulder movement and there is no pain when his arm is raised above his head, such as when he’s laying on his back.
• There is more control in his wrist (instead of it falling limp) when doing arm exercises.
• His concentration level has increased, and he started doing Sudoku puzzles again. He was a master player before the stroke and he hadn’t done any since, so this is a great improvement.
• Left knee pain has diminished considerably and he doesn’t need to wear the brace which kept his knee from buckling, although he stills wears the AFO brace for foot drop.

I wish I had more improvements to report, and I think if Steve could have endured more HBOT sessions, we would have seen greater results. The hyperbaric oxygen therapy did help, but we’ll never know how much could have been accomplished. If Steve’s ears and sinuses didn’t bother him so much when he was in the chamber, he probably would have done more. He expected to see faster results, so he was disappointed. He set his expectations so high that anything that fell short of them was disappointing to him.

The maximum pressure that Steve was able to endure was 2ATA. It took about 14 HBOT sessions to get him to endure that pressure. In the beginning, the maximum pressure was 1.5 ATA , but it was slowly increased when he could tolerate the greater pressure on his ears. It took his technician about 15 minutes to take him down to the maximum pressure  in the chamber as it slowly increased (compression), and 15 minutes to bring him up while the pressure decreased  (decompression). So he was sustained at the maximum pressure for about 60 minutes. Because of his sinus/ear problems, Steve’s technician didn’t want to try a greater pressure.

The pressure, length of time, and number of HBOT sessions were variables that may have affected his outcomes. I don’t have any regrets even though the treatments cost about $2200 out-of-pocket, because at least he did have some success mostly in the area of pain relief.