What a Holiday! by GMC

In March 2010, I left Australia for the UK with 2 of my closest friends to catch-up with other friends in London, ski in France, visit Italy and then come home via New York. All started well with all of us meeting up in London and skiing in France. It was our last night the 2nd April and we all went out for dinner and on our way back to the lodge to collect our taxi to the train we all went different ways. However I did not make it back to the apartment, instead I collapsed and thankfully for me my friends became concerned and one of them found me in the snow. I had suffered a subarachnoidal hemorrage, no headache, no warning signs - so to my suprise I woke up in hospital several days later. I can not remember much of the first 4-5 days other than my friends, my mother and aunty coming into ICU to visit me. They coiled the ruptured aneurysm and ten days later once moved to high dependancy they coiled a 2nd aneurysm. Over the next week my friends returned home after sacrificing our holiday to stay in Grenoble, France with me and my family. Next my aunty returned home once she knew I would be okay. 3 weeks of rehabilitation, learning to walk again and building my strength my Mum and I along with a Dr returned to Australia.

It was challenging being in another country where english was not the first language - but the care I received was amazing.

I then spent 6 weeks at home regaining strength prior to going back to work part time and now I have moved into a role that allows me to work 4 days a week. This allows me to have a little more down time, as 8 months on I still suffer a level of fatigue and my memory is definitely not as good. But I have worked to get my physical fitness back to a reasonable level - running the 5.7km run on the day of the Melbourne Marathon.

Physically I had lost about 10kg and my hair. Today if you did not know me prior, you would not know what had happened this year. But I'm still learning things all the time about what occured - treatment, doctors, my reaction to medication. Apparently I questioned one of the doctors about if he really knew what he was doing!!! (The Dr put it down to medication and strength).

With Christmas on the door step I feel very fortunate that I have been so lucky and have had such a good recovery. And I'm very fortunante to have friends and family that supported me.

But on another level I feel quite alone with not having contact with people that have had similar experiences. I worry when I get headaches, which I get more frequent than ever before. I feel that my memory is not quite what it was with forgetting what I was saying in mid sentence (maybe this is just age). I have been given the all clear by the specialist and will be on a 12 month MRI review plan to ensure nothing goes wrong in the future.

So all in all I'm very fortunate. I have had great support from my friends and my family are still healing from the experience. I am wondering when you will go through a day when you don't think about what has happened?