I am not a believer in anything hocus pocus. And despite the following, I’m still not. But whatever it was/ is, I’m incredible grateful and thank my lucky stars every day…
Just after I got home from a two month trip around east Africa… I felt weird at work (brand new job), I had a dull headache, felt spaced out, really tired and was struggling with my speech… my manager told me to go home but I was determined to finish off some meeting minutes and circulate them (as I’d volunteered to do it, because I could barely stay awake and figured that it would help me focus… if everyone was relying on me doing the minutes…) but my manager kept coming in and telling me I looked really pale and should go home. In the end she insisted on driving me to the station. She finally got me out the office and by the time we were at the station I was blacking out. I was having a brain haemorrhage. The paramedics thought I was drunk and kept asking how much I’d drunk and if I’d taken any drugs.
Luckily my manager kept insisting that I was definitely not drunk and had not taken any drugs.
If I’d left any sooner and got on a train by myself I’m not sure I would have got the help I needed. Definitely wouldn’t have been rushed so quickly by ambulance to the best stroke centre in London.
After a few weeks of being in hospital I was discharged and went ‘home’ to live with my parents, whilst waiting for brain surgery to remove the cavernoma (the mass that was bleeding in my head).
I had the surgery and got home just in time for Christmas. My Dad wasn’t feeling great and I spent all my time with him… looking after him, making meals, getting things for him (he couldn’t walk as his leg was so painful). Turns out he had a blood clot in his leg. Not that the doctors listened. Kept telling him it was a muscle sprain.
He died really suddenly, at home, a month later. Massive pulmonary embolism. It was unspeakably awful.
Putting that aside for a moment, as it’s a whole other very long and traumatic story… If I’d had the brain haemorrhage a month earlier, I’d have been in the middle of a jungle in Uganda and almost certainly would have died.
If it had been a month later, I’d have come round in hospital to the news that my Dad had just died.
Don’t get me wrong. It was all bloody awful. He was only 57. But if it had to happen (turns out the blood clot was due to very extensive liver cancer that he would have been unlikely to have survived), the timing couldn’t have been better. I spent so much quality time with him. And I was there with him when he died.
Anyway… When I was pregnant last year, we were told at a 32 week scan that our son was critically ill, out of nowhere he suddenly had an enormous amount of fluid compressing half his brain. We had no idea if he was dying, or if he would survive. The sonographer was really experienced but clearly distressed about what she was seeing. It was awful. She cried.
We decided to go and see a private foetal medicine specialist as the hospital were only monitoring his vitals and said there were no specialists available to see us for three days. And nothing that could be done until we saw a foetal medicine specialist. We were going out of our minds with worry and lack of information. All we knew was that there was 8cm of fluid compressing one side of his brain and they didn’t know if it was blood or csf and no idea if it was trauma or an aneurysm or a cyst… literally no idea.
As we prepared to try and sleep the night before the private appointment, my wife showed me a photo of the specialist. I remember thinking, why the hell is she showing me a picture of my Dad?
I kid you not, this photo was the spitting image of my Dad. It looks more like any photo you’ll ever see of my actual Dad.
I sent a screen shot to friends and family, just to see if I was making a bigger deal out of it than it really was. I didn’t say who it was or anything, just asked who the photo reminded them of.
Without exception, they all asked where the photo was taken and commented that they had never seen this photo of my Dad before. Even my Mum was speechless.
I remember thinking, wow, maybe this is a sign. Maybe we’ll turn up at the specialist’s clinic and he’ll just tell us it’s all sone terrible mistake and the scan was wrong and this whole nightmare will just go away. Evaporate. Vanish, like it was never there.
But it was too overwhelming to even think like that it dare to hope. It felt too flippant. Too ludicrous to even imagine something so ridiculous. What was happening was no joke.
So we went, and were being sensible with our expectations and trying to stay rational… we thought maybe he’ll be able to clarify everything and perhaps it would be a cyst and the baby would survive but need a shunt to drain the fluid but ultimately he would live.
So the specialist was incredible. Really easy to communicate with. And after a lot of scanning he asked us if we could wait whilst he saw his next patients and come back for a more indepth scan… which we did… and after a lot of in-depth ultrasounding, he finally said, “I’m sorry, it must be really unsettling to have medical professionals tell you one thing and then another medical professional tell you the complete opposite… but the more I scan this baby, the less concerned I am. I can see no abnormality at all. Nothing. Everything is within completely normal parameters.”
And he was right. There was no blood. No fluid. Nothing. Not even a tiny thing. His brain was completely fine.
He looked at the original scans and tried to replicate them by putting the ultrasound device at funny angles etc (he said sometimes you can cast a shadow called an artefact, giving a false impression when it’s at a funny angle) but he couldn’t.
The team at the hospital later did exactly the same thing! Kept trying to see if they couldn’t recreate the original scan but nobody could.
So we went from ‘your baby might not survive and if they do, they may be severely brain damaged’ to ‘your baby is completely healthy’.
In the interim, of course, I’d already blamed myself and convinced myself it was all my fault because I’d been playing fruit ninja too vigorously on a vr head set.
Anyway. He turns one this Sunday and is doing just fine. They scanned his head just after birth to be sure and it was all fine.
We are currently hoping for another miracle.
We are undergoing ivf and out of my 12 mature eggs only 2 have fertilised.
Can you send all your positive thoughts to our two little embryos… statistically they won’t make it to day 5. But you never know. Maybe they’ll defy all odds and survive. We’ll find out on Saturday.
Im scared to hope. But you never know.