I’m Sarah, and I’m a Brit living in the UK, but I was living in Boston when I had an aneurysm rupture back in December 2014. I’d just finished unloading the car on a Monday afternoon after a weekend away when I had an instantaneous very, very (very!) bad headache – it felt like my head was being crushed. I had no idea what was going on, and simply took myself off to bed. My husband was away, but a neighbour found me and insisted on taking me to the primary care physician the next morning. By then, I had developed a stiff neck, too, and she simply prescribed muscle relaxants and sent me home.

The symptoms got progressively worse over the next couple of days, with the headache and stiff neck being joined by nausea and flu-like symptoms. I assumed it was an infection that would clear itself up, and stayed in bed – a good thing, as it meant I didn’t get on a flight to London a couple of days later. I wouldn’t be here now if I had.

My (wonderful!) neighbour insisted on taking me to the ER on the Thursday and, eventually, they found the aneurysm. I had brain surgery to clip the aneurysm on Saturday morning, and was back home less than a week later. Recovery was a gradual process, but I was really fortunate to have had such great care. 

Before it happened to me, I had no idea quite how common aneurysms were. Yet when you tell people you had one, it’s not unusual for them to say, ‘Oh yes, my grandma had one of those!’ or ‘My friend’s sister died from a ruptured aneurysm.’ But people still don’t realise what the symptoms are, and I had no clue what that really bad headache was telling me. Even experienced medical practitioners – like my PCP – often miss them.

And that’s why the work of the Brain Aneurysm Foundation is so important. Part of it is raising awareness about aneurysms and their symptoms to improve diagnosis, part of it is supporting survivors and their caregivers, and then there’s its wider advocacy for research funding, and raising funds to support aneurysm research projects. As well as new treatments, these include looking for ways to predict who is more likely to have an unruptured aneurysm. Despite the fact that one in 50 of us has one lurking in their brain, we rarely have any idea that it’s there unless or until it misbehaves. If we were able to predict who was more likely to have an aneurysm, then it could be fixed before it ruptured. And if we could do this, then the odds of survival would be far better.