The Operation

I am a 48 yr old adopted male that has now been married for 25 years come the 9th May 2012 I have two sons one is 20 and is doing a Microsoft IT Apprenticeship and the other is nearly 18 years old studying music at college and plays in his own band called Caged Spectrum.

I was working on Saturday 7th April as my boss asked if I could do extra hours to paint the car workshop so there I was busy painting away as it was a large workshop and we ran out of paint so I went to my boss and got some petty cash and jumped in the truck and headed to the paint shop to get concrete floor paint.

I parked up went into the store got the paint and went to the desk to pay only I had a thunderclap headache like nothing I have had before right across the leftside of my skull with that I then passed out and vomited. Thinking back now I wonder how lucky I am as the great man above must of been watching over me because had this happened 5 mins earlier I would have been driving down the dual carriageway at 60mph and certainly would not be here now to write this.

So I come around at the hospital and because I had epileptic fits as a child they put it down to this and sent me home the following day to bed rest , but that night at home in bed I took another turn for the worse and felt very giddy and not with it at all so my wonderful wife called the out of hours GP who came out and called an ambulance.

Back in hospital this time they gave me a lumber puncture to test for meningitis but that came back as negative so they sent me over for an MRI scan this time it was bingo and a burst aneurysm was found on my middle cerebral artery.

Now at this point the hospital I was at did not do Neurological Operations so I was transferred from Portsmouth to Southampton where the nearest centre was this was also remember April 1990 and no coiling was available here in the UK as it did not come here from America until early 1992 so I only had one option that was to open my skull and do a craniotomy to clip the bleed.

Although I put on a brave face deep inside I was bricking it and thinking all manor of things like will I survive, will I lead a normal life, will my wife still want me, will I be able to still have children, man all many of things was rushing through my head.

Anyway I went down for the operation and all I can remember is being wheeled down and a beautiful nurse talking to me for reassurance then putting me under.

I woke up 8 weeks later in ICU as I had been in induced coma to rest my head and to reduce the swelling to find my wife beside me that I can tell you now was a wonderful feeling.

I was in ICU for 3 weeks then transferred to a regular ward for a further 3 weeks before being ambulanced back to the Portsmouth Hospital where I started this journey however the driver tried to help me out of the back of the ambulance but no I wanted to get out my self what a fool I was as I went flat over on my face due to losing my balance lol.