Eye test spots tumour

On a Sunday morning, Stephanie Carr had a routine eye test. Less than 12 hours later she learned she had a brain tumour.

The 32-year-old had been ‘‘pretty slack’’ at getting her eyes checked in recent years, and her glasses were old and a bit ‘‘shoddy’’ – so she booked a test. The Auckland woman had been getting some blurred vision. She thought she was just tired.

On May 29, a scan was taken of her eyes at Specsavers Massey. From the jump, optometrist Rukshani Wickramasinghe had ‘‘alarm bells in my head’’. Between Carr’s scans, headaches and visual disturbances, Wickramasinghe knew it was ‘‘something quite severe’’. A slit-lamp examination – used to look inside the eye – showed the optic nerve was swollen and raised, and there was bleeding.

Wickramasinghe said Carr had papilloedema – increased pressure on the nerve. She rushed Carr to Greenlane Hospital for more tests, then a scan at Auckland City Hospital. It showed Carr had a tumour on the front left side of her brain. Things moved fast: ‘‘In the morning I was fine and in the evening I had a brain tumour.’’ Carr had a meningioma, the most common type of head tumour. Most grow slowly, often over years. Doctors believe hers was growing since childhood – to a point it ‘‘couldn’t get much bigger’’.

‘‘It was a matter of months before I could have lost my sight or died.’’

Within days, Carr underwent a 121⁄2-hour surgery, where surgeons cut her skull open. They had to leave a small piece of the tumour in place, as it was connected to the main artery in the brain, she said, but it was not cancerous. The first weeks were ‘‘pretty tough’’. But Carr ‘‘bounced back really fast’’.

She wanted people to know eye tests could help with ‘‘a lot more than just your eyes’’, and not to assume an eye issue is insignificant or will just go away. Carr said the appointment ‘‘saved my life’’ – and had made the ‘‘should’ve gone to Specsavers’’ slogan a running joke in her family.