My name is Arlicia Albert. I am from Beaumont, Texas, and I reside here in the DMV now. I was a staff pastor, but now I am a global pastor. I had a ruptured brain aneurysm, August 15, 2011. It was my mother’s 72nd birthday, what a birthday present. I got up taking a bath that morning and collapsed, while they were waiting for me to get to the church. I was taken to my local hospital in Beaumont where they actually thought I overdosed on drugs. It wasn’t until a lady in the ER says, there’s no way, that’s the pastor at my church. And by that time, my husband who’s in the United States Army was stationed in Houston. He had driven all the way from Houston to Beaumont, at the hospital and I was still on a gurney, literally dying and no one knew it. 

And he burst through the doors and said “I’m not going to serve this country and y’all not take care of my wife.” Nurses and doctors come flying from everywhere and they did a test and they found I was bleeding on the brain. I’m a research patient. After the first attempts to repair my brain aneurysm were unsuccessful, I qualified for a procedure, a stent-assisted coiling, which is what saved my life. We didn’t discover the history of brain aneurysm in my family until we started doing, you know, when they go do the family check. Do you have this in your family? Do you have that in your family? And once they did that, here’s the thing, my grandfather died of an aneurysm, his brother had one lived and later died and my mother’s sister had her aneurysm five years before I had mine. 

I discovered the Brain Aneurysm Foundation as an online group. I started talking to people that had aneurysms and it was so inspirational. Then there was a little ad that came about the Brain Aneurysm Foundation would be in Washington, DC. I’m like, I’m going. People don’t hear anything until it happens to them. So my story and my purpose is for me to go and share what I have to help other people.