Dr. Sandra Lee says she had a stroke while treating a patient and filming her reality TV show in November, a medical scare she first brushed off as a hot flash before realizing something was seriously wrong.
The 55-year-old dermatologist said she was super sweaty, restless and in pain, with shooting aches in one leg, trouble sleeping and difficulty walking down stairs. She said her left side later felt wrong, her hand would slowly collapse when held out, and she struggled to articulate and enunciate before going to the emergency room.
An MRI then revealed an ischemic stroke, Lee said, and she stopped filming immediately. She spent the next two months recovering. “It was just a shock,” she said, adding that she had slurred speech and weakness on one side and kept telling herself, “Well, this is a dream, right?”
Lee said her blood pressure and cholesterol were not under control and that the pressure of caring for patients while working on the show had added to her stress. Her series follows her work as a dermatologist extracting cysts, blackheads and lipomas, a job that has made her a familiar face to viewers who know her as Dr. Pimple Popper.
Her account lands in the middle of a wider public-health reality: ischemic stroke is the most common type of stroke and accounts for about 87% of cases, while strokes are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States and kill more than 165,000 people a year. Lee said the experience changed how she thinks about her own health. “I want to think about it as a blessing in disguise,” she said. “Because it reminds you to take better care of yourself.”
The larger question now is not whether she returned to work — Lee said she did after recovering — but whether the warning signs she described will push her, and others who hear her story, to treat the first unusual symptoms as an emergency instead of something to sleep off.