Team DailyPedia
“What started as a bump on my head led to me finding out I’d got five brain tumors.”
It was in October 2014 when 42-year-old Katherine Dance, a local of Binfield, Berkshire noticed a lump on her head. Since she was working as a diving instructor in Greece, she didn’t bother about it and thought it was just because she had hit her head.
A month later, she decided to have an eye exam while visiting her family in the UK. The optometrist saw that her top eyelid and the lower half of her eye did not meet so Katherine was advised to take a blood test, believing it may be due to a thyroid problem. However, after doctors saw the results, she was immediately referred for MRI and CT scans.
Dance was shocked when she was diagnosed with five brain tumors, three on the left side and two on the right side of her brain. One was so huge and cancerous that it expanded outside her skull.
She said, “If the tumors had not been found so early, the first I would have known about it could have been as a seizure,” adding that “If this were to have happened whilst I was teaching underwater, it could have well proved to have been fatal.”
Dance was immediately scheduled for surgery to remove the tumors and have them it tested for cancer. Half her skull was removed along with the growths.
“The one at the front right side of my brain had grown at such an accelerated rate, but because it had grown so much, the original six-hour procedure took 14 hours,” she told the Daily Star.
However, after the operation, the patient suffered a stroke which left her with memory loss and difficulty in talking. She was also unable to move her left hand and her left eye became blind.
Today, she is on the road to recovery, with the help of Jason, her husband of 16 years. The doctors are already printing a 3-D model of her skull to replace the missing bone.
Jason also said the swelling from the operation is slowly going down and his wife is walking farther every day during therapy.
Featured image via Caters News Agency
