Mercy Hospital is marking its 14th straight year as the recipient of the American Heart Association / American Stroke Association “Stroke Gold Plus Award,” a recognition of their level of care of stroke patients. To help celebrate the news Monday, they welcomed back a young man who is one of their success stories.
Mason Vail is 21 years old. Standing six feet and five inches tall, he appears at first glance to be a regular healthy young man. He was working toward obtaining his Commercial Driver’s License.
But in June 2025, he had a stroke.
“What's interesting is the night before I was playing basketball with my friends for about three hours, and then I went home,” Vail explained. “I went to sleep, and I woke up, and it started almost immediately.”
He felt a pain in his head, while his arm was going numb. He attempted to look up a possible cause of his discomfort online but kept dropping his smartphone.
Luckily, his father was downstairs and outside the house working in the yard. His father, a teacher, was home on his first day of summer break.
“I kind of had to hobble outside, you know, like crawl a little bit. And he got me in the car almost right away, and he sped me on over to Mercy, called my mom on the way, and we kind of recollected here,” Vail recalled. “But I think it was the efficiency of how that happened, how quickly he got me here, combined with how quick they took care of me while in the hospital. That really, really helped me.”
Hospital officials, discussing their latest Gold Plus recognition, explained the technique used to treat Vail and save him. It was developed in Western New York by doctors including Elad Levy and Nick Hopkins, the latter of whom mentored Jason Davies, a vascular neurosurgeon at Mercy Hospital.
“Back in the 90s and early 2000s he saw what we were doing in the heart. Somebody comes in with a heart attack, they'll go in and try to pull out the clot or open up the plaque, and we didn't have anything like that for the brain,” Davies said. “In fact, nobody that was doing neuro intervention would train him how to do things, so he went to the cardiologist and said, ‘teach me how you do it.’”
Clinical trials followed and by 2015 it became a common practice.
Doctors credit Vail’s family with recognizing the signs of a stroke and acting quickly.
“Stroke care really starts with the patient himself, or family, because really, that's the key part. The first thing is to realize something's wrong, and getting us over, that is the key part that a lot of patients miss out on, and if there is a delay that puts everybody behind on the game,” said Dr. Kalyan Shastri, Neurology at Mercy Hospital.
There’s an acronym for recognizing stroke symptoms, BE FAST. B stands for balance issues, E for eyesight or vision problems, F for facial droop, A for arm or leg weakness, S for difficulty with speech, and T for time, as in time to act.
Vail says people his age feel invincible. He urges them to learn the warning signs.
“I always, always, always tell anybody that I talk to, ever since it happened, even the little things, I absolutely spread the message of stroke awareness,” he said.
His life is back on track. He successfully obtained his Class B CDL, allowing him to drive buses or one-unit trucks. In addition to advising people to be aware of stroke symptoms, he’s also sharing the message of appreciation.
“Ever since it happened, and you can ask my mom, I will never hang up a phone call or leave a house without telling my family I love them,” Vail added.
