I waited by that phone all day long. My grandparents and aunt tried to do all that they could to try to distract us. At 11 years-old they could have done just about anything to take my attention away, but the reality was that I knew exactly what was going on. As much as they tried to sugar-coat the details or hide things from us, I knew that my mom was at the hospital laying on an operating table while the doctors opened up her skull and tried to save her life.
It was just a few weeks earlier that they found the aneurysm.
For years she had complained of headaches and migraines. They became debilitating at times. She’d rush to the emergency room where doctors would give her a X-Ray and CT scan, but ultimately send her home with shot of powerful pain meds that would make the headache tolerable.
It was one headache that told her to investigate further. I have flashbacks of that day often. The images run so vividly through my mind. My mom was in bed with a pillow over her face and blinds closed. The light made it worse. My dad had taken her to the ER the night before, but the meds didn’t work. She called her doctors insisting that something wasn’t right. Although they had done tests at the hospital, one of her doctors told her to come into his office. They did more tests and a MRI that afternoon and that’s when they found it. The golfball-sized aneurysm behind her right eye. Doctors think that she’d had it her entire life and it just kept growing as she got older.
There were only a couple of hospitals in Florida that performed that kind of surgery. My parents made the decision to go to Miami where a team of doctors spent an entire day planning her surgery. She was rushed down by ambulance from Tampa to the hospital just a few days after the discovery of the aneurysm.
My dad watched as they wheeled her into surgery and sat in the hospital room while all four of us kids stayed at home in Tampa. My little brothers were oblivious to what was going on, much too young to understand. And I tried to protect my sister from the details because I didn’t want to scare her.
As the oldest child in the family, I felt it was my duty to stand up and take charge. With my dad in Miami, having a sister that was only 10 and two brothers under 2, I needed to take over for my mom and do just as she would have done if she were there. I wanted to keep our house as normal as possible, even though it was so far from that.
The phone rang. 10 hours after she was wheeled into the operating room. She made it through successfully, but not before suffering a stroke on the table. It was going to take time for her to recover. She had a long journey ahead of her. We, had a long journey ahead of us.
The Brain Aneurysm Foundation describes a brain aneurysm as ” a weak bulging spot on the wall of a brain artery very much like a thin balloon or weak spot on an inner tube.” Over time that spot can have added pressure that eventually becomes weaker and eventually will rupture. Some of those that suffer from aneurysms may not experience any symptoms at all, others, like my mom, will have headaches, seeing double, pain above or behind the eye.
My mom’s surgery was nearly 20 years ago, but her journey is still very evocative to me. I’ve never publicly come out and told her story. People know bits and pieces, but I haven’t ever sat down and put those pieces together. Possibly to avoid the pain and just pretend it didn’t happen.
Recently I’ve seen story after story in my Facebook newsfeed of people who aren’t as lucky as my mom was. Aneurysms that have ruptured and have cost many people their lives with no prior warning until it was too late. With this being something that has had so much impact on my life, I didn’t want to be silent any longer.
As my mom recovered and would visit the doctor frequently, a question she asked the doctor was if this was hereditary. “They can be,” her doctor informed us. It doesn’t mean that I’m guaranteed one, but it does mean that I should take precaution and get myself scanned.
Growing up I was constantly reminded of the changes in our lives because of my mom’s aneurysm. Any time you do an extensive surgery on a person’s brain, there are a lot of risks and outcomes that could change their lives forever. It did ours. I won’t go into details on her before and after, because it’s not important, but what is important is that my mom is here with us and she is healthy.
If it wasn’t for my mom’s instinct to keep going to doctor after doctor urging them to find out why she was having all of these headaches, I am certain my mom wouldn’t be with us here today. But I am so thankful she is. And I thank those doctors that saved her life. And my life as well.
I love you mom.
There are possible ways that you can detect aneurysms early and get screened, you can find out more on the Brain Aneurysm Foundation’s website.
