I was in a business meeting, luckily with my sister, when I had a brain haemorrhage. Initially, I thought it was a migraine. I had spent the morning feeling fine and actually lifting heavy boxes around, as we were getting ready to move house. So when I started to feel unwell, I treated it like any other day. I asked around for some paracetamol and tried to crack on with the meeting.
Then, all of a sudden, it felt like someone had stabbed a rod through my right eyeball and into my brain. Seconds later, it felt like water was rushing into my head and filling it up, putting immense pressure on it from the inside out. My sister started to call 111 for advice, but then the stabbing started to move down my spine, locking up my back as it went. I told her to hang up and dial 999 instead. I knew something was very wrong. We tried to move me to the bathroom as I felt sick and my legs wouldn’t work properly. My head felt like someone was trying to pull it in two.
Luckily, the ambulance arrived within about 20 minutes, and we were close to Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge, which is an amazing hospital with a world-class neuro team. They found that I had an aneurysm that had burst. They couldn’t say whether the aneurysm had formed recently or had been there my whole life.
They performed surgery to coil the aneurysm, cutting it off from the blood flow and by 3 pm the next day, I was on the recovery ward.
Prior to that day, I showed zero signs that I was someone who could be susceptible to a brain aneurysm or haemorrhage. I had long quit smoking and was not a heavy smoker back in the day. And although I had a few stressful years of work, I always maintained good blood pressure, which is the more direct correlation, rather than stress itself.
I was generally young, healthy and fell very much outside of the typical risk profile. The doctors told me many times that I was just very ‘unlucky’.
As soon as it happened, the bar for what good or even OK meant dramatically shifted for me. I actually found myself feeling extremely happy, grateful and at peace through the early days, despite being in pretty horrific pain 24/7.
I came very close to losing everything. Anything after that point felt like a win. Even if it was experiencing pain. It all felt like a privilege.
The blood had leaked into my brain, but the same fluid in your brain runs down your spine. And, for me, aside from the head-splitting pain, this is where the issues really showed. When I came out of the theatre, my body was locked up from the base of my skull to the back of my knees. All of my nerves were unhappy, and over the coming weeks, we had to wait for the blood to reabsorb and the damage to calm down in order to get things working again.
I also struggled with light and concentrating audibly and visually on anything. This meant no entertainment of any form, including reading. There was a lot of lying in dark rooms in silence, in pain, hour after hour, day after day!
As hard as this sounds, the hardest thing for me was actually seeing the impact it had on my family. It was stressful and draining for them. I could see how much it weighed on them. I was so used to being someone who would fix their problems and make everything better, and I just simply couldn’t do it this time. I couldn’t even hug them or let them hug me at times. It was really hard to watch.
In the year following the haemorrhage, I attacked life with serious determination. I had seen too many stories of people being in the depths of recovery for years, and it was getting me down. I decided it wasn’t going to be my story, and I set my sights on getting stronger every day.
In the 1st year, I travelled to 4 countries, learnt to surf, started weight training again, started 2 new jobs, moved house and launched a new business. When I look back, it sounds insane! But I was thriving on setting constant challenges for myself, constantly raising the bar, hitting it and moving on to the next one.
It was absolutely what I needed, and I am so glad I did it, and that I have a partner who understood what I was doing and backed me all the way.
I am so much more zen than I have ever been. In a lot of ways, I do feel like I died and got a chance to start over. When I was lying in the hospital bed after my brain surgery, I remember thinking, ‘there is literally nothing I care about other than: can my body do what I need it to do for me to live? And are the people I love OK?’ I have tried to keep that level of simplicity going.
We let so much other noise fill our brains, our hearts and our lives, and none of it really adds value for us. What does this person think of me? Am I doing enough? Worry, worry, worry. I have just let all of that shit go.
When I was waiting to go into surgery, we knew there was a chance I would be wheeled in and not return. Although I was confident I would, I was also fully at peace if it didn’t go my way. And this REALLY shocked me. I always thought I was scared of dying. But when I was actually faced with it, all I could think of was how I had lived, and I couldn’t think of any way I could have done it better. And I was at peace.
I had loved well (myself included), I had chased my dreams, I had seen the world, I had helped build strong communities, and I had given to lots of causes.
Yes, I had made a ton of mistakes, fallen hard, had debt, had bruises and was very far from perfect. But in that moment, I also realised how absolutely imperfectly perfect I was and how magnificent the whole beautiful mess of it all was as a canvas. One that was potentially about to be committed to history.
Before going into my surgery, I remember a desperate need to try and convey just how OK I was to my husband and family if the worst happened, so they would know I went away at peace.
None of us can know when our time will be up. Here is what I learnt about getting to that point and not being afraid to pass over:
It’s never too early to start living like you’re dying.
Every day be scared (as shit if possible) and do it anyway. Whatever it is. Dream bigger, love harder, give more, build things. Fall, fail, laugh about it, brush it off and go again. Do it every day—for all the people who don’t have the privilege like we do.
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