NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) – Last spring, at just 36-years-old, 1010 WINS editor Kyle McMorrow woke up with what he thought was just simple pain in his neck. Once at work in the newsroom, he began experiencing more symptoms and felt "something was wrong."
"I was having pretty bad neck pain and I couldn't walk a straight line," McMorrow, of Brooklyn, told Newsline with Brigitte Quinn. "I said something's not right. I'm not sick, but something's wrong."
He left work to see a doctor and, while he was on the way, called his girlfriend, who urged him to go to the emergency room at the hospital instead after hearing that he was slurring his speech.
"As soon as they looked at me, they were like, 'OK, this guy's having a stroke,'" he recalled.
After undergoing tests and scans, doctors at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center identified McMorrow had a cavernous malformation and that an irregular blood vessel had burst in his brainstem, setting off a cascade of worsening symptoms.
McMorrow was hospitalized and ultimately decided to undergo preventative brain surgery, which was followed by months of rehabilitation, including speech and occupational therapy.
"I did a lot of work with them—six days a week, three hours a day, it was a grueling process," he told 1010 WINS' Lori Madden. "Even after the surgery, I still had to go through all of that."
He experienced depression and spent time researching similar cases as he sought motivation to keep going. He said he needed to find "someone out there who went through a similar experience, just to show me that it was possible." When he did, he said that was "sort of what got me over the hump."
"I said to myself, if I ever do get out of this, one of the things I want to do is spread awareness and make people aware that you could be going through something similar, but there is a chance to make it out."
