On the 2nd day in hospital, as a reaction to the trauma it had suffered, my brain swelled up so much that it didn’t have any more space inside the skull and was starting to increase the pressure inside my head to very dangerous levels. Imagine your left brain is swelling by 20% but your skull has a fixed volume and is not flexible.  It was absolutely imperative to remove half of my skull through a second operation to let the brain expand outside of its box. The main threat is the risk of infection to the brain as the brain is basically left only with the scalp on it until they can close the skull again with a prothesis. My husband gave the doctors permission to do this because otherwise, if my left upper skull was left intact, I would have had a 70% chance of dying that same night. I was rushed to the operating theatre.  The doctors had to remove my left upper skull so that my brain could ‘breathe’ so that it could continue swelling outside of the skull.

 

After this decompressive hemi-craniectomy (that’s the name they give to this operation), I was in intensive care for two weeks.  After one week, I woke up to see my beloved husband.  I felt ecstatic to see him again. My feelings were also deep gratitude that I was alive, subconsciously (my utmost desire was to live and so my whole body fought to survive).

I could not speak, but I was not worried about it at all, I would speak soon, or so I thought. Whereas my husband worried about it a lot – what if the vocal cords were not working after the stroke, he thought.  He told me later what illness I had: he said I had had bleeding in my brain (he did not say stroke as he thought I would get anxious).

 

I was fiercely determined to live a normal life. I was half-paralysed on my right side from my head downwards, all the way down to my toes.  The right side of my face (my eye, my cheek and one side of my mouth) were all hanging down, lopsided!