Aurora teacher suffers 3 strokes in 5 days due to neck injury
DENVER (KDVR) — An Aurora teacher went from seemingly perfect health to multiple strokes within a week of each other.
David Justus, 55, moved to Colorado at the age 24 to attend Adams State University in Alamosa. Since then, he’s spent much of his time in the mountains. From biking up Mount Blue Sky to rock climbing to white water kayaking, Justus did almost every activity imaginable – including the Ironman six times and Colorado’s Triple Bypass three times.
The activities didn’t stop once he turned 50. Just last summer, he raced in Steamboat and climbed 13ers and 14ers.
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By all accounts, he was in perfect health – that is until he suffered from three strokes in the span of five days.
The signs were there.
It started with fatigue, bad vision and poor balance. At one point, Justus almost fell when he was teaching a class. But he didn’t go to the hospital until February when he fainted and woke up on the floor.
“It’s this back and forth very quickly in front of your eyes, it starts like that, gets faster and then it combines with over your front to back, head over heels” said Justus. “And that’s when I just went down and I was down and I don’t know how long I was out. It felt like an eternity, but it was only a few seconds. Before I could call my wife, I couldn’t get off the floor.”
At the time, the doctors didn’t know exactly what happened. He was put on medication for a cardiac stroke. What the doctors didn’t know at the time was his stroke wasn’t because of his heart.
After he went home, he suffered from a minor stroke and another major stroke in the span of five days.
“The 14th, it was the worst Valentine’s Day my wife and I ever had in our 25 years of marriage. So that one was in the evening and she watched me collapse. That’s pretty tough,” said Justus.
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After another hospital visit and six days of observation, doctors discovered Justus suffered from a cervical artery dissection, which occurs in the vertebral artery from a neck injury.
Doctors say these types of strokes are generally caused by car accident whiplash, aggressive chiropractic neck adjustments, self-adjustments or other related neck injuries, according to Justus’ blog post about the incident.
While Justus said he didn’t remember one specific injury that caused it, he thinks it came from prolonged injuries that never healed and through chiropractors and training.
Now, Justus has a six-month recovery ahead of him. In the future, Justus wants to return to the education system and use his doctorate in education.
“I love teaching. I love working with kids, especially that 60% who need somebody who can relate to them, and push them and get them into the basic ideas of learning, how to learn. And you know that they can be very successful on their own. They could do anything they want if they put their mind to it,” said Justus.
From trekking up mountains one day to being out of breath taking out the trash the next, Justus wants to raise awareness for non-cardiac strokes.
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In his blog, he mentioned he wanted to raise awareness for active people who are at risk for these types of strokes, especially those who have repeated injuries to their heads and necks.
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