“I can’t see your hand at all,” she told him.

“We need to go to the emergency room,” Chris said.

She had some tests. “The doctor came in and said, ‘Well, it turns out you had a stroke,’ ” she recalled. “I don’t know if the doctor’s words or Chris’s expression scared me more.”

The next months were the worst of her life. “I didn’t go through a day without crying,” she said. She was afraid to exercise or even turn her head.

“At some point,” she said, “I got really angry about, why the hell do I do everything right and then almost die? From playing tennis? The thought of not being able to do anything more than what I’d already done was so sad to me.”

Tara was part of a disturbing health trend, according to a Washington Post piece that ran a month after she had the stroke. After years of declining in the elderly, the paper reported, strokes are rising among younger adults.

Because they are accustomed to being healthy, younger stroke victims often deny or ignore the symptoms, leading them to miss treatment in the critical hours and days afterward. And, because they look young and healthy, doctors often don’t consider stroke as a cause.

Tara lost 30 percent of her peripheral vision. Doctors told her to cut back on physical activity.

“So I was going to walk gingerly and turn my head slowly and do what I needed to do to see Kasey grow up, and that was my battle,” she said. “I was living like I was made of glass.”