Minutes after collapsing while anchoring a newscast last week, WAVE anchor Dawne Gee regained consciousness in an ambulance to find herself paralyzed from the neck down.
“I kept trying to say, ‘Something is not right.’ I kept saying, ‘I can’t move. I can’t feel my face,'” Gee told the Louisville Courier-Journal. The longtime anchor at the Louisville NBC affiliate was having a stroke. “I can’t even explain it,” she said. “Like your limbs are concrete and you can’t move them.”
Gee tells the Courier-Journal doctors recommended the use of a “clot-busting miracle drug might restore blood flow to her brain and reverse the damage,” but the risks were significant: seizures, another stroke, even death. Gee ultimately decided to take the chance. “Nine minutes later,” the paper reports, “at 11:31 p.m., Gee could lift her head. The feeling of pins and needles began to fade. By 11:43 p.m., she could move her arms and lift her legs.”
Gee faces weeks of rehabilitation and testing, and it’s not clear when she might return to WAVE.