California man didn't know he was living with a 'ticking time bomb'

Richard Horton woke up one morning needing to use the bathroom. He got out of bed, took a couple steps and stumbled into the wall.

The 55-year-old insurance broker told his then-wife, Bridgette Horton, he thought he might be having a stroke. It was the only thing that made sense. Still, he brushed it off and went back to bed.

A bit later, Bridgette was headed to a family funeral. He assured her he'd be fine. But before she left, she heard him talking to a client on the phone, and the things he said didn't make sense.

"Why are you talking like that?" she said.

"I don't know," Richard said.

She again asked if he was OK, and he said he felt fine.

After the funeral, the couple went to the emergency room for good measure. They expected to be in and out in a short time. Instead, tests revealed that he'd indeed had a stroke, the kind caused by a rupture of a weakened blood vessel in his brain.

This, he soon learned, was the result of "a ticking time bomb in my body" that he'd been living with for over a decade.

Richard had uncontrolled high blood pressure. Over time, it wreaked havoc on his blood vessels. He was so vulnerable that upon being transferred to a larger hospital better equipped to handle his condition, it happened again.

"I was bathing him in the shower," Bridgette said. "He fell, and I caught him."

It left Richard paralyzed.

"The only way I can explain it is like the left side of my body died," he said. "It was just a very, very weird and scary feeling not to be able to walk, not to be able to use my left hand."

Richard spent more than two months in the hospital undergoing speech therapy to strengthen his voice and physical therapy to strengthen different parts of his leg and improve his gait. He began to stand and walk with the help of a leg brace. When he...