While at a yoga class, Aaron Barnett had a stroke. Luckily, his yoga instructor knew the signs and called 9-1-1. Within three hours, Barnett was airlifted to Harborview Medical Center's comprehensive stroke center where a team of experts were ready and waiting. Doctors performed a mechanical thrombectomy on Barnett to remove the clot causing his stroke.

“It's not open surgery, it's a procedure that is done through catheters. They go through the femoral artery in the groin and then they can snake the catheter all the way up into the blood vessels of the brain and try to pull out blood clots,” explains Dr. David Tirschwell, Director of U.W. Medicine’s Stroke Center.