“I wondered, ‘Am I blowing this out of proportion? Am I crazy?’”
Julie Brothers
Her neck was still stiff. Though the thought of meningitis briefly crossed her mind, she brushed it off, assuming she had just slept in an awkward position.
Desperate for relief, she booked an Uber and dragged herself to a neighborhood walk-in clinic.
“I know they’re not particularly equipped to deal with medical emergencies … but I didn’t think I was having one,” Brothers said.
Julie Brothers
At the clinic, she described her symptoms to the doctors and mentioned that she suspected they might be caused by a migraine.
They agreed without running any tests. Instead, doctors gave her a shot of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for the pain, a prescription for some anti-nausea medicine and sent her home.
Brothers isn’t alone.
“Misdiagnosis occurs 25% of the time because of the failure to do a scan,” Christine Buckley, executive director of the Brain Aneurysm Foundation, told The Post.
When pain turns deadly
A day and a half after the pain first struck, Brothers was lying awake in bed, tormented by a relentless headache and racing thoughts.
“I don’t know if this is part of being a woman and what we deal with with our bodies, but I wondered, ‘Am I blowing this out of proportion? Am I crazy?’” she recalled.
By 1:45 a.m., she’d had enough. Weak, dehydrated and desperate, she called another Uber — this time to the ER at Mount Sinai Morningside.
Julie Brothers
She sat in the backseat as the driver blasted club music, the smell of his air freshener making her queasy as she fought to keep from vomiting all over the car.
When she staggered through the hospital doors and described her symptoms, the ER staff sprang into immediate action. They quickly checked her vitals, administered fluids and pain medication through an IV and rushed her in for a brain scan.
The diagnosis was terrifying: a ruptured aneurysm, roughly the size of a marble, had been leaking blood into the space around her brain. It was sitting at the base of her skull, lodged in the wall of her posterior communicating artery.
