Laurie Robertstad is a 37-year-old government/sociology instructor at Navarro College in Corsicana, Texas. Her husband of 5 1/2 years, Dave, is an elementary P.E. teacher. They are the proud parents of a three-year-old son, Grant, who still remembers the trauma and fear of his mother's ordeal in the summer of 1997. The three of them consider themselves to be the luckiest people on the face of the earth.
As a community college instructor who had a particularly difficult spring semester, I looked forward to the rest and relaxation the summer of 1997 would bring. My in-laws were coming from Wisconsin to visit for a few days over the Memorial Day weekend - after that, it would be me, my husband and two-year-old son. We had planned to just play it by ear and go wherever we wanted to, whenever we wanted to, until fate intervened on June 23.
We were returning from a trip to the Texas coast when I first started to feel "funny". I had a pretty severe headache behind my left eye and I felt a little dizzy. Nothing really serious, I thought. I've just had too much sun. However, after we had returned on a Friday, I continued to feel this pain and lightheadedness through the weekend and into the next week. I saw my primary care physician on Tuesday, and he gave me medication for a migraine. I had had a couple of migraines (or so we thought) since the birth of my child but nothing that had ever lasted this long. It took three different types of medication over the course of two days to finally get rid of the headache. The lightheadedness never went away.
Finally, on Saturday night (June 22), my tongue and face began to tingle. It scared me to death, but I didn't say anything about it to my husband until the left side of my face went numb. He immediately called our physician, who told us that he wanted to get an MRI later in the week. I told him that I didn't really want to wait until later in the week, but we live in a small town and the MRI machine is only at our medical facility a couple of days a week and never on weekends. My doctor said I could go to our local hospital and get a CT scan, but that he didn't think anything would show up, "unless it's something big and bad like a brain tumor or an aneurysm, which it's not." My husband and I talked it over and I decided that if the numbness was still there on Sunday morning, I was going to our hospital and insisting on a CT scan. It was.
The hospital personnel and my doctor fought me over the scan, but eventually relented at my insistence. When my doctor came in to give me the results, his face was ashen. He told me there were two "lesions" on the brain — "surgically correctable, I think" — and said we would have to find me a neurosurgeon in Dallas. I was Care-Flighted to Medical City Hospital — Dallas in the middle of a Texas thunderstorm (that was as frightening as the aneurysm!) and was assigned to Dr. Martin Lazar.
After performing an angiogram very quickly after my arrival, he told me that I had a wide-mouthed aneurysm on my internal carotid opthalmic artery. This is why I had experienced tingling and numbness not only on the left side of my face, but also down my left arm a few weeks earlier. Further tests showed that it was neither ruptured nor leaking, for which I was very thankful. However, the surgery to correct it was going to be very tricky. Dr. Lazar allowed me to go home for a few days to get everything in order and told me to report back for surgery on Sunday, June 29. The surgery would start first thing in the morning on Monday, June 30. Dr. Lazar told my family not to look for us until late that afternoon.
Saying goodbye to my son was the most difficult thing I've ever done. How do you explain to a two-year-old the severity of a cerebral aneurysm? "Mommy has an owie in her head" seems so simplistic, yet it was the best I could do. I cried halfway to the hospital at the thought I might never see him again. However, once Dr. Lazar came into my room that night to explain everything to me, a peace came over me that I couldn't quite explain. Here I was, about to have a craniotomy, and I was more calm than anyone else! I knew that my work on Earth wasn't done, not with my son or with my "kids" at school, and I knew that God and Dr. Lazar were going to take care of me. I just felt it. I was not going to die.
Well, I was right. Eight and one-half hours after beginning the surgery, we were finally finished and everything went great. I don't remember this, but I apparently became very irritated when Dr. Lazar and the nurses began asking me the standard "after surgery" questions. I was particularly miffed about the "who is the president of the United States" question. I told them that was an awfully stupid question to ask a government instructor and proceeded to go back all the way to Jimmy Carter! Needless to say, my memory is fine!
The only ill effects I have suffered have been a severe allergy to Dilantin, for which I had to be hospitalized and shot up with Decadron. I am now on 750mg of Depakote a day, which has caused me to gain ten pounds, but I feel fortunate to even be here. Like many of you, I have also suffered the depression and fatigue that seems to go along with brain surgery — Zoloft has helped me greatly in that area. I also used to worry about every little twinge I felt in my head. I don't do that anymore. I have to believe that if something was going to happen to me, no one would have found an aneurysm on a CT scan in a small town hospital.
So, I never got to have that carefree summer of 1997 that we had planned. But, thanks to the events of last summer, I now have an opportunity to plan many, many more.
Please write to me if you have any questions or comments. So many of the narratives have helped me tremendously — I hope that mine can do the same for someone else.
Update 26 Jun 98
I have now hit the "one year" mark after my surgery and continue to do quite well. I had my one year check up last week and Dr. Lazar has allowed me to go off of the Depakote since I never had a seizure and was taking it strictly as a precautionary measure. I'm down to one pill a day — so far, so good! The one year anniversary has stirred a lot of emotions for both me and my family, but we are doing fine. I feel that I've now crossed another major hurdle. My husband and son are providing the altar flowers at our church on Sunday in my honor and we're celebrating Tuesday, June 30 (the "big day") by taking off on that carefree vacation we didn't get last summer!