Tessa David-Burns was living the life of a healthy, active 28-year-old. A dancer, she had spent five years as a cheerleader for the Indianapolis Colts before joining the Dallas Cowboys' squad. She worked as a spin instructor and nanny on the side and was in a happy relationship with her then-boyfriend, now husband.
"Everything was perfect," she recently told the Indianapolis Star. "And then I had a stroke."
In December 2014, David-Burns was taking a shower when she felt like her right arm had gone numb. Thinking it was just a "pinched nerve," she brushed it off, but when she stepped out of the shower, everything was blurry. Quickly, she felt a massive headache come on and as she tried to go to her room her legs went dead.
David-Burns made it to her bed, where she went in and out of consciousness for 36 hours as she suffered from a near-fatal stroke.
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There are four main keywords to remember with strokes, part of the acronym FAST: F for facial drooping, A for arm weakness, S for speech difficulties and T for time, because every second counts during a stroke to save someone from further brain damage. As David-Burns lay in bed, she was unable to talk and communicate.
"Nothing would come out, like no words would come out," David-Burns, now 35, said.
Somehow she managed to call her boyfriend, now husband, Justin Burns. But she still couldn't speak.
Burns thought it was just a "bad connection," and called her back, but still, she couldn't get any words out, and he texted, "Please Txt me if you're alive!" Her family and friends started to worry after more than a day, and asked the police to do a welfare check, when finally someone realized she was having a stroke.
At the hospital, doctors were amazed that she was still alive, and told David-Burns' family that she may never walk or talk again.
"The time that elapsed, the doctors don't understand how I survived," she said. "And I don't understand how I made it, how I made it through that."
Because of how long it had been before David-Burns made it to the hospital, she had extreme swelling in her brain. After 12 days in the ICU, she couldn't speak and was partially paralyzed on her right side, and stayed in the hospital for two more months.
"I could do nothing. I couldn't move my foot. I was in a wheelchair," she said. "I could do nothing at the time."
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David-Burns worried about Burns getting stuck with her, and tearfully tried to break up with him, writing it out on a dry erase board, but he told her, "no."
"I fell in love with that Tessa and then, after the stroke, she became another Tessa and I fell even more in love with her," Burns said. "To overcome all the adversity — I'm not going to say every day was bright and sunny — but she had an extremely positive mindset from Day 1 and she didn't sulk. She just pushed forward and wanted to do better."
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David-Burns moved to rehab, where she started to make an amazing recovery that shocked her doctors — she can now talk and walk without a cane or brace. But she does have significant limitations. She has aphasia, which makes it difficult at times for her to speak clearly; can't move her right hand; has weakness in her right leg and can't read or write.
In 2017, Burns proposed, and the two now have two children, Elora, 2, and Bodin, born in September. David-Burns told the outlet that she feels like her life is pretty close to perfect again, though she had many difficult days when she couldn't talk and struggled to move.
"But I would cry and then I would lift myself up again and move on," she said. "People have it harder than me. Don't get down."
