Life with a Brain Aneurysm

The last week in May of 2002 was one of the worst weeks in my life. I can still remember it as if it were yesterday. My mom sitting across from me at the table telling me she had a brain aneurysm. I just remember starting to cry and telling her that I didn't want her to die. The next few weeks were a blur. Since her aneurysm was so large they wanted her in for surgery as soon as they could get it scheduled. We had three weeks before the surgery and what was the first thing I did? I got online and started looking for information. What a mistake that was! All the stuff I read did nothing other then make me worry more then I already had been.

June 18, 2002 was the longest, scariest day of my life. We arrived at the hospital bright and early so we could see her before she went in for her surgery. Now I'm an only child, so this being my mom was a pretty big deal to both of us. The surgery was only supposed to last 4-5 hours. Every family had a pager and if your pager went off that meant one of the doctors wanted to speak with you. I jumped every single time a pager went off. Nine hours later she was out of surgery. Of course we still had recovery to wait through. That was the longest day of my life. First, I spent the entire day wondering if she was going to make it through the surgery. Second, if she did make it I wondered if she'd be able to walk and talk okay. Thankfully she made it through the surgery just fine.

The next few weeks went by fairly quickly. I spent a lot of days just sitting at the house with her while she slept. She wasn't allowed to drive for six weeks so I had to take her places from time to time. During this time we were still waiting on a call from the neurologist to confirm whether or not there was another aneurysm in her brain, and there was. Luckily this one was much smaller so they decided to do a less invasive surgery to fix it. I was feeling good thinking she'd have the surgery, be fine and we'd all get back to our normal lives. Well, they weren't able to do the surgery due to an issue with the neck off the aneurysm. She made it very clear that she was not going through brain surgery again. The only other option was to simply monitor the aneurysm.

The next several months I slept very little. I would lie in bed at night and wonder what I'd do it that aneurysm ruptured. Anytime the phone would ring at an odd hour I'd flip out. I'd spend hours researching things on the Internet to see what our options were. God must have known that I needed something else to preoccupy my time. I had a party for her one year after to celebrate her "new" life. That same night I found out I was pregnant with my son. All of a sudden I had a new focus and it was a nice change.

Even though she survived the surgery she'll never be the same and neither will I. Her memory isn't as good as it once was, she tires more easily, she never was able to go back to work full time and there are several other things that came along with this. It's been one heck of a ride these last seven years, but I wouldn't change them for anything. All of the blessings that came from something so awful have just been amazing!