He wants to offer hope to stroke victims

Laguna Beach resident Kenneth Mullinix had a nagging cough. While driving home after a pickup volleyball match on Main Beach in January 2015, an acquaintance from the beach called him with an offer.

The man suggested that Mullinix stop by his house and take a prescription medication to relieve the symptoms.

It didn’t help. Mullinix, 58, a real estate broker and appraiser, got worse, much worse.

Thirty minutes later at his Cliff Drive apartment, Mullinix, a fixture on the volleyball and basketball courts, started vomiting and getting feverish, symptoms he later learned were caused by a stroke.

Mullinix, who is single, stayed in bed for three days, mustering only enough strength to crawl to the bathroom and kitchen, his mind too fuzzy for him to know that he should seek help.

“I became scared as to what would happen next,” Mullinix said in an email. “I began to hallucinate and felt if I could just hold on to the bed I would be OK. I began to spin and lost all of my faculties and thought processes. I was awake the whole time as my room was spinning. I passed out from the pain.”

Concerned friends who had not seen Mullinix at the beach in days went to his apartment and found him in bed. They rushed him to Mission Hospital Laguna Beach.

Mullinix wanted to share his story to let people know that recovery from a stroke is possible and to offer a warning not to ingest medication prescribed for someone else.

William Dodge, an emergency room physician at the Laguna Beach hospital, took a CT scan of Mullinix’s brain and determined he had suffered a “mid- to moderate-sized” stroke. Strokes occur when brain cells die from blood loss, depriving tissues of oxygen and nutrients.

About 800,000 people in the United States have a stroke each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One American dies from a stroke everyfour minutes.

“He had multiple areas of the brain affected by the stroke,” Dodge said of Mullinix. “It can be lethal and leave someone permanently disabled.”

After the CT scan, Mullinix was transferred to the stroke center at Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Laguna’s sister hospital, where he stayed for a couple of days while doctors performed more tests and monitored his vital signs.

Once home, neighbors brought food and watched over Mullinix during his recovery.

In the months that followed, Mullinix struggled with slurred speech, hearing loss and ringing in the ears. Mullinix said he had to turn down work projects after the stroke and exhausted his savings paying for medical bills since he didn’t have insurance at the time.

He was in the process of applying for health insurance through Covered California, the state’s resource for residents to apply for coverage under the Affordable Care Act, when the stroke hit.

Mullinix said he is improving daily.

He exercised regularly before the stroke, but the incident spurred him to boost his workout intensity and alter his diet. Mullinix joined a gym five months after the stroke and now lifts weights, swims and rides his bike.

Mullinix eliminated breads, desserts, red meat and eggs from his diet, instead filling up on fruits, vegetables, chicken and fish.

Last month, on the anniversary of his being released from the hospital, Mullinix lifted weights for two hours in the morning. He then ran round trip on the sand between the Newport and Huntington Beach piers.

Next year Mullinix will either swim from the Newport Pier to Balboa Pier, or run in the sand from the Wedge in Newport to a recognizable fast-food restaurant in Seal Beach, he said.

Mullinix never found out the name of the medication he ingested, and Dodge said it would be difficult to blame the medication as the sole cause of the stroke.

Regardless, Mullinix said he learned a lesson.

“I [took the pill] without thinking,” Mullinix said in a phone interview. “I want to tell people, ‘Don’t take that kind [someone else’s prescription] medication.

“Life will throw many obstacles in your way as we go through this special journey. It is how you handle them that will make you who you are in the end. Live every day like it is you last on Earth — you never know.”