Apr. 26--On Dec. 19, Suzanne Aymeric, administrative assistant, mother and avid runner, sneezed.
Shortly thereafter, she went to a Christmas party at her mother's house in Orangevale.
Twenty family members chatted in cliques, snacking on chips and dip and hot wings. Her divorced parents' new spouses were there.
"You know when you sneeze really hard and you pull a muscle?" Aymeric, 43, complained. "I pulled my neck."
Her sister, Geni, offered a few words of sympathy, but nobody paid attention.
"Because everybody's got a sore neck," said Gil Aymeric, her father.
The next day, a Sunday, she started putting up her Christmas tree. She used a few wrong words when talking to her family and went to bed at 7 p.m., feeling woozy.
The day after that, a Monday, she tried to get out of bed and fell to the ground.
The sneeze had caused a massive stroke, and Aymeric spent the next five weeks in Mercy General Hospital, paralyzed on her right side and unable to speak.
When Aymeric sneezed, the sudden movement tore the major artery in her neck, the carotid.
The tear caused a blood clot to form, which broke loose. The clot wedged itself in the left side of her brain, blocking blood flow and damaging about a third of her left hemisphere.
Doctors say her story, while rare, shows the importance of recognizing stroke symptoms early.
"It only takes 5 to 8 minutes of no blood flow to brain cells before they start to die," said the neurologist who treated her, Dr. Alan Shatzel of the Mercy Neurological Institute. "Ideally, she would have come to the hospital as soon as she had the onset of symptoms."
It's not just sneezing that people should be wary of, Shatzel said. Other actions in which the neck is craned and twisted, such as yoga, painting a ceiling, vomiting or chiropractic manipulation, all have caused the so-called "spontaneous dissections."
While they account for only 2 percent of all strokes, they account for 10 to 25 percent in young and middle-aged patients, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.
Four months later, Aymeric is recovering at home in Natomas. She has not regained full mobility in her right side, though she can now move both arms.
She also can speak now, with difficulty. While she does not have trouble with comprehension, expression is excruciating. Words hover at the tip of her tongue and won't leave.
"I can't remember which words to use," she said. "It's there, but I can't get it out."
Numbers are the most difficult. She can't say how many weeks she was in the hospital.
"Um, this many fingers," she says, holding up five fingers.
She spends her days at home, watching the Nickolodeon Channel with her 3-year-old daughter.
It's unclear whether she will fully recover. Her rehabilitation doctor, Dr. Albert Hwang, said stroke patients do the most recovery during the first six months and generally stop improving after a year.
Aymeric is optimistic.
"It just kind of happened, and I just have to deal with it now," she said. "But I'm hopeful."
She misses running. She has completed four marathons and loved exercising with her boyfriend.
"It's like I'm stuck," she said, gesturing at her wheelchair with one hand.
Before the stroke, her boyfriend was training for the Western States Endurance Run, a 100-mile, 30-hour ultramarathon from Squaw Valley to Auburn. It is in June, and she was planning to run 37 of the 100 miles with him.
Now the goals have changed. She said she's working harder than she ever has -- to be able to stand up and cross the finish line with him.
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Call The Bee's Anna Tong, (916) 321-1045.
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