This woman revealed how a bad headache turned out to be grade four brain cancer.
Sophie Clibborn, from Southbridge, New Zealand, was at her graduation when she started to experience a headache that got progressively worse and left her unconscious.
After she was rushed to hospital, Sophie underwent a high risk emergency brain surgery to remove a tumour, with her parents fearing for her life.
She said: “I got taken to the hospital, and when I got there, we pulled into the non-emergency line.
“However, once a nurse saw the color of me, they knew that someone was seriously wrong.”
The teenager explained how she had experienced headaches before but this time around the pain only got worse and painkillers did not seem to relieve any pressure.
Sophie’s mum found her semi-unconscious when she got home from work and the last thing she remembered was throwing up and collapsing backwards before she was fully unconscious.
The retail worker claimed that paramedics were not too worried about her condition and she was even in the non-emergency line in the hospital.
However, once a nurse noticed her state she was rushed into some testing and was rushed into emergency brain surgery where the tumour was luckily removed.
Sophie explained the high risk of the operation and how her parents were told to say goodbye in case she did not wake or if she became paralysed after.
However, the teenager defied the odds and woke up from her coma a day early and was discharged just three days after her surgery.
She said: “Throughout the day after my graduation, the headache just got worse and worse.
“It was worse than I had ever been. The headache before would usually pretty much stay pretty much the same and on this day the painkillers were not working at all.
“By the time my mum got home from work, I was actually semi conscious. “It took about two hours for the ambulance to get to my house, and by the time that they were at my house, I was completely unconscious.”
The last thing Sophie remembered was throwing up in her bathroom, collapsing backwards and falling unconscious.
She added: “My parents said that they had to say goodbye to me in the hospital because my chances of survival were so low that the doctors were like, ‘you should say goodbye to her now’.
“When I went into emergency brain surgery, they managed to get all the tumour out, thank goodness, and it actually went really well, but it was a pretty scary time.
“They thought that when I woke up from my surgery, they thought that I was going to be paralyzed in some way, but I actually woke up completely fine.”
Sophie explained that she even woke up from her coma a day early and started her quick recovery.
She said: “I recovered super well. I actually managed to get home in only three nights, which is incredibly fast after a major brain surgery.
“Then after two days of being at home, we got called into the hospital to get our biopsy results, and that was where they told us that it’s a high grade malignant cancer.”