NIU nursing professor rebounds from stroke

by Mark McGowan

The surgery was routine. The stroke afterward was not.

Sue Elster, a professor in the NIU School of Nursing, had bilateral replacements of both knees Jan. 9, 2001. While lying in the recovery room, she suffered a moderate stroke that affected the right side of her brain and the area of the brain where speech is located.

Elster spent five days in the neurological ICU and another six days in the neurological unit before she was transferred to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC), where she began 13 days of an in-patient stay and four months of out-patient therapy.

"It was just brutal," said Elster, who since has returned to work at the School of Nursing, "but the care was exemplary. The RIC is just wonderful and well-deserving of any of the kudos it gets."

The institute, which School of Nursing Chair Marilyn Frank Stromborg said is "the world's leading rehabilitation hospital," honored the school with an award for contributing to Elster's vocational recovery by incorporating her back into the work place.

Elster's successful rebound from her ordeal "is one of the most positive and reaffirming things we've had in the school in a long time," Stromborg said.

"We've watched her incredibly hard work to be able to return," Stromborg added. "Sue just adds this tremendous dimension, of having been through this experience, that she can share with the students: not only what it means to be a patient, but to have a major life-threatening condition occur, and then all the hard work you have to put in to getting well again."

Days at the rehabilitation institute began at 7 a.m., when Elster was expected to get herself bathed, dressed and fed. Simply pulling pants on over her bandaged knees could take 10 grueling minutes or longer.

"The regimen is hard, but necessary," she said. "You're not given much help, but a lot of encouragement."

By 9 a.m., Elster was expected in the therapy room via walker or wheelchair to begin a 90-minute workout. After a half-hour's rest, she reported in her wheelchair to the "big room" for group exercises. Lunch followed another brief break.

Each afternoon brought more therapy, including work on her speech and her legs, and more group exercises. She also participated in various research studies.

"Then dinner," she said. "You're exhausted."

Her progress was impressive enough to earn release a week early. By the end of that March, less than two months after the stroke, she began driving herself. By June, her therapy ended.

The ordeal tested her spirit, especially because her nursing background meant she "knew more than I should've known," giving her inside knowledge of what was happening to her and what lay ahead. There were moments when she did not want to live.

But she found motivation inside herself, despite the obstacles.

"I was too young to sit back and not achieve optimal recovery. I'm just stubborn. I just knew I could do it," she said.

"A lot of my self-image deals with my ability to articulate. Not being able to have total control over my language was very difficult. I still don't. I used to talk a mile a minute, much to the chagrin of my students who needed to take notes," she said. "Now the students help me out finding words when I find those blocks I can't get around."

Elster also discovered inspiration on the next therapy table, which held a football player rehabilitating from a tendon transplant.

"Whenever he was yelling, so was I," she said. "It made me not feel as much a baby because when he was howling, I was howling."

The long road back to NIU, where Elster has taught since January of 1995, has steered her mostly away from the classrooms where she spent the last 24 years. Lecturing is stressful, she said, and physiological tests show she has recovered as much as she will.

Instead, Elster usually works one day a week as an adviser to nursing students preparing for the National Council of State Boards of Nursing Licensure Examination (NCLEX).

"That works well for me because I don't have to lecture when I talk to them. One on one, the words come easier to me," she said. "Dr. Stromborg has been very kind to use me in this respect. I like having my little niche here. My colleagues are so supportive and wonderful."

Elster, who also has taught medical-surgical nursing at the Univeristy of Illinois-Chicago, the National Institute of Nursing Research at Bethesda, Md., the University of New Mexico, the University of Rochester and the University of Washington in Seattle, occasionally lectures on the end of life, her research area.

She also is mentoring new nursing faculty at "the best place I've ever worked."

"It's something I enjoy, to be able to give in that way, and that's fine with me. It's OK," she said. "I have it so much better than some other people who've had a stroke. You just get on with it. It could've been a lot worse."

3-31-2003