Trillium In The News

The Mississauga News

A Killer Headache: Survivors recall trip through hell and back

August 22, 2003

Judy Anderson wants to desperately thank the man who saved her life three months ago. But she hasn’t the slightest clue who he is, where he came from, or why he was there in the first place.

She can’t even remember what he was wearing or the colour of his cell phone. He came and went like a breeze, but the mark he left will last forever in Anderson’s heart.

That day - Friday, May 2nd – started out as any other. Anderson, a self-employed accountant, spent much of the early morning working diligently out of her Clarkson home. She then took her Mazda to a local garage to get the oil changed, before returning home for lunch.

At a restaurant near her home, Anderson picked up an order of fish and chips, one of her favourite meals. Just after 2 p.m., Anderson got into her car and headed to Royal Bank on Lakeshore and Mississauga Rds. to meet with her financial advisor and discuss her mother’s will (Mary Horner, 84, suffered a stroke and passed away in April.)

She hoped her meeting wouldn’t last too long; she had an appointment with her eye doctor to update her eyeglass prescription.

But Anderson never made it to the bank. The Clarkson resident knew something was wrong as she drove down Southdown Rd. Her head had started to pound.

Anderson was no stranger to headaches, but that one was different. It felt as if her head was being pierced, getting deeper with every blow. “There was this unbe-lievable pain in my head, like things shifting around,” she recalls. “The pain was just so intense. Part of me thought it was a bad dream, but part of me knew it was real.”

She didn’t know it at the time, but Anderson had a brain aneurysm that was rupturing. Without immediate medical attention, she would die.

Anderson continued to drive for about a kilometre before the pain forces her to pull over, where she began coughing and then vomiting.

“I thought that was it. I would die right there at the side of the road,” she says, reliving the horrific incident in an interview with The News.

But just as all hope seemed lost, another motorist, a man, pulled up behind Anderson. He had noticed her car swerve and slide as she struggled to pull over.

“He saw me in that state I was in and used his cell phone to call 911,” recalls Anderson. “He stayed there with me until police and ambulance arrived. He refused to give his name to police. He didn’t want any spotlight.”

Peel paramedics rushed the dying Anderson to Trillium Health Centre, where doctors performed an angiogram and began draining blood from the ruptured aneurysm.

“If they didn’t do that, it would have been good-bye time,” says Anderson. “If that gentleman didn’t get to me when he did, I wouldn’t be here right now. Other cars just kept going, but I guess something told him to stop. Thank goodness for me.”

The worst, however, was yet to come. Doctors operated on Anderson – a procedure called clipping – to stop the blood flow into the aneurysm. Anderson’s neurosurgeon, Dr. Arlan Mintz, cut into her skull and placed a tiny metal clip around the aneurysm to prevent more blood from entering it, so additional bleeding was prevented and nearby brain tissue protected from further damage.

Anderson was told of the risks associated with this type of operation – a long list that included stroke, loss of vision, loss of speech, development of a blood clot and even death. “I knew I could die on the operating table. I knew I could be left incapacitated in some way,” she said “But I’d rather be dead than left permanently incapacitated.”

Anderson woke up hours later in Trillium’s Intensive Care Unit, hooked up to a myriad of wires and tubes to allow doctors and nurses to monitor her breathing and heart rate. She pulled through surgery without any temporary defects, but life as she knew it had changed.

Prior to the rupture, Anderson’s life was filled with activity and excitement. In addition to six and seven-day work weeks, she took aerobics classes and walked regularly. Any spare time was spent on yard work and volunteering at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB).

After the rupture, much of that ended, at least temporarily.

Aerobics and long periods of reading have become too strenuous, and Anderson has hired a house cleaner. She still has trouble bending over; it gives her a splitting headache. And, she virtually has waved good-bye to long work weeks.

“I know I won’t be able to get back to that place,” she says. “Doctors said it could take me a whole year to recover, but I’m just going to take it one day at a time. My life has to be a little more laid back. That’s what this experience has taught me.”

Like most patients who have an aneurysm, Anderson was unaware of hers. The only true indicator, doctors said, was her high blood pressure, an increasingly common condition.

A brain aneurysm rupture can hit anyone at any time, as Elizabeth Karapetsas can attest. Looking at the 16-year-old Mississauga girl, everything seems normal. She has an infectious smile and engaging attitude, while her looped earrings and denim summer outfit give every indication she is a typical teen with an eye on fashion.

But as soon as she starts moving and talking, the differences become apparent. Her slurred speech and fidgety gestures are the unwelcome after-effects of a rupture last July 17.

While eating dinner in her family room and watching one of her favourite movies, Ernest Goes to Camp, Karapetsas started to feel what she calls “an earthquake” in her brain. She ran upstairs and started to vomit.

Within minutes, her parents Spiro and Anne, had rushed their only daughter to the Hospital for Sick Children, where a team of doctors told them Elizabeth might not make it through the night.

In less than an hour, Karapetsas developed a five-centimetre rupture that spilled blood into her brain like a fountain. Unable to stabilize her heart rate or blood pressure, doctors operated right away.

As more than a dozen surgeons and nurses connect the teenager to wires and tubes, Spiro Karapetsas recalls thinking the worst.

“I thought this is it. I’m going to lose my daughter,” he says. “It was by far the worst time of my life, the worst feeling I’ve ever felt. One minute I’m telling my daughter not to eat in the T.V room, the next minute she is on a hospital bed.”

But after a 10-hour surgery, and what doctors describe as a stubborn will to live, the teen’s life was saved.

Although she defied the odds, she was still forced to deal with the consequences. Karapetsas missed a year of school and couldn’t speak for three months. Her speech is still difficult to understand at times and her physical activities are limited.

“I don’t know what I did to deserve this, but I’m not going to let it ruin me,” Karapetsas says while sitting with her dog, Taco, in the family’s Highgate Place home.

“I’m going to get better and be an inspiration for other kids with aneurysms, and I’m going to become a teacher.”

Karapetsas’ horrifying ordeal couldn’t have come as more of a shock. The always-athletic teenager was a premier long-jumper at her former school- Glenforest Secondary School, and she had just been accepted to a private high school in Oakville for the coming year.

But things are once again looking up for Karapetsas. She is returning to school at Gordon Graydon Secondary School in September and she has definitely retrieved her sense of humour. “I didn’t miss school at al this year,” says the vivacious teen. “But I’m looking forward to (Gordon) Graydon because I hear there are a lot of boys there.”

Like Karapetsas, Erin Mills resident Debbie Dempster had no warning signs until her aneurysm ruptured Feb.21, 1994. Now 50, Dempster’s toned figure and infectious charisma show virtually no trail of her near-death en counter nine years ago.

Dempster was in her room, while her husband, William, and two children were
downstairs watching television when what she thought was a headache began to develop. But, the pain grew- walking and talking became almost impossible.

“At first I thought I had a migraine, but this was no headache,” says Dempster.
“I thought my head was going to explode.”

Dempster’s husband rushed her to Trillium, where doctors explain they need to clip the aneurysm.

When fate struck Dempster like lightning, she was a model for fitness and good health. A low-fat diet, coupled with a regular workout routine, convinced her she would never be plagued with a health problem.

“It just goes to show that no one is invincible,” she says. “Anything can happen to anybody at anytime.”

The likelihood of Dempster walking away from the operation without any kind of damage was alarmingly slim- two per cent, doctors told her. Weeks after the operation, Dempster still had difficulty forming sentences and enjoying one of her most treasured past times - reading.

“I would read two pages and wouldn’t remember what I had read,” she says. Today, nine years after her aneurysm ruptured, Dempster can read an entire novel and tell you what happened on page 46. She has also incorporated fitness back into her life; she power-walks every night.

According to Dempster, all is back to normal-or almost. “I’m a better person now. I find that I’m more appreciative now of the little things, like the fact I can walk,” says Dempster. “My family and I don’t put vacations off anymore, we just do it. I’m just happy to be alive and doing the things that I love.”

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