British Woman stayed awake during 8-hour brain surgery

Shafaq News/ A woman who suffered a stroke has revealed she stayed awake during an eight-hour operation to remove a brain tumor that left her with a stammer.

Emily Sudlow, 26, thought she just had a 'cold' when she endured a 13-day headache in November 2016.

She told how she initially did not grasp the gravity of the situation when doctors said she had a bleed to the brain.

“I only told my family I’d had a stroke over text the next morning – by which time I was on the stroke ward."

Emily was diagnosed with a cavernoma – a benign tumor on her brain which had burst, causing a stroke that affected her speech, balance and right side of her body.

She said, “I felt this sense of disbelief that something I thought wasn’t that serious had caused permanent damage.”

Unable to work, Emily, from Stoke-on-Trent, spent the rest of the year having intensive speech and physiotherapy.

But the cavernoma was like a ticking time bomb in her head – threatening to burst again at any moment and cause another stroke.

With a history of mental health problems including depression in her teens, doctors were wary of removing the tumor in case a major brain operation was too stressful for Emily.

But a surgeon at Salford Royal Hospital in Greater Manchester agreed to operate if she passed a series of neuropsychology tests.

On May 24, 2018, with her head numbed above her ear using local anesthetic, surgeons entered Emily’s brain through her jaw, cut off the cavernoma and sucked it out using a special device.

While she drifted off to sleep at some points, she says she spent at least half of the eight hour operation awake.

She said, “I think they realized they had gone as far as they could go then and stitched me back up.”

“While everyone around me on the recovery ward was being sick from the general anesthetic, I was sat up, drinking and talking with the nurses,” she said.

But when the swelling first subsided, after three hours, she could only make speech-like sounds at first, followed by single words or short phrases.

Routine scans in November last year revealed a second benign tumor in Emily’s brain, but, luckily, doctors do not believe it will affect her health and she is determined it will not hold her back.