What went wrong with my brain?
In all situations, including business endeavours, I always ask myself “why?” Why did I not make this sale? Why did my competitor get the client? Knowing “why” is vital to improvement.
But some issues are more important than business. And some questions have no answers. For me, I’ve spent years asking myself two vital ones: Why did I end up in coma? Why did I almost die?
On my 29th birthday, I felt I was living an incredible life. I was finished graduate school and had lived in cities across the world including New York, London and Paris, and in the Napa Valley. I was at the top of my game career wise and was in excellent health — completing bike rides for charity and running half- marathons at every opportunity I got.
Things couldn’t have been going better. There was absolutely no cause for alarm. Yet during the 2013 Christmas season, I started to experience shooting pains down my entire body and intense headaches. I t hought it was merely the flu, but that theory was quashed a few days later when I began to slur my speech. A CT scan revealed that I had a twocentimetre mass in my brain. Questions were flying back and forth between family members and medical staff. I just lay on the hospital bed utterly dumbfounded, in shock.
Tests began immediately: blood tests, MRI scans, EEGs, spinal taps and every other option you can imagine. It was a horrible, it was painful, and not how anyone would want to spend their Christmas holidays. And it was frustrating. Even after seven days of intense medical scrutiny, there was no definitive answer as to what had gone wrong in my brain.
Enough of these nonsense tests, I thought. I’ve got better things to do. It was time to get back to my awesome life.
My doctors took some convincing, but I finally got to go home, celebrate a belated Christmas with my close-knit family and sleep in my own bed. Unfortunately, I woke up the next morning and couldn’t feel my right arm. During the 20- minute drive back to the hospital, I lost the feeling on the right side of my face, had convulsions and, finally, lost consciousness.
This began a true nightmare for my family. Two days after falling unconscious, the pressure in my brain was building up at a rapid rate. They had mere minutes to decide whether to consent to emergency brain surgery. They did give permission and, after the surgery, had to wait in excruciating uncertainty to see if I’d ever wake up.
In the end, of course, I did wake up. But the moment I did, I wished I had died. I had no ability to speak. The right side of my body was paralyzed. How would I laugh, joke and talk about daily events with my family? How would I get to do my Saturday- morning boxing class? How would I have meetings with my prospective clients and win that business?
Dying was not part of the plan. But neither was living, if we could call it that, like this.
Moving forward meant swallowing my pride and accepting my new situation. The outspoken, fiercely independent and athletic woman I had been was now reduced to a helpless shell of a person, who required feeding tubes and a catheter, and was wholly dependent on nurses for the simplest of tasks.
I was mortified, humiliated and furious. I had always valued my freedom and independence. I desperately longed for the old me, the woman I’d been proud to be. I had to find a way back to her.
What that meant in practice was hundreds of hours in therapy for months on end. I re-learned how to walk (and eventually run), and as well to speak and re- establish the connections in my brain, restoring the cognitive function I’d lost. I even ran a halfmarathon a mere 10 months after my stroke.
So a happy ending for me. But the horrifying question still remains: why did a 29- year- old, healthy woman have a stroke? Was there anything I could have done differently? Were there signs we missed? Could the medical team have spotted something? Can anyone learn from my experience?
Right now, we don’t know. And that haunts me. We need to do better. That’s why I’m so invested in the annual Brain Awareness Week ( March 14-20, this year). It’s vital to understand more about brain function ( part i cularly women’s brain heath) to prevent strokes, as well as ensure these do not result in a crippling disability or death. For this to happen, we need to encourage the best researchers to continue their work, and guarantee they have access to the latest technologies and steady funding.
I am confident that one day — in the not so distant future — I will find out my “why.” But it’ ll take hard work to get there. Let’s make sure it happens.
I WAS 29, HEALTHY AND FIT. BUT PAINFUL HEADACHES GREW RAPIDLY WORSE … AND MY FAMILY’S NIGHTMARE
BEGAN.