A woman has explained how her condition drastically deteriorated when she believed all she had was a persistent cold.
Amanda Hyne was diagnosed with a brain tumor in a moment that came as a massive shock to the mother.
The 37-year-old spoke about how over the months her health started to dip and highlighted the symptoms she experienced.
Hyne spoke to the New York Post and explained that she had been balancing her family commitments and the raising of her two young children, 18 months and four at the time, when her symptoms started.
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She said: “They’re amazing and they are so much fun, but it’s a lot. It’s a lot to juggle.”
At the time she was a clinical social worker at the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at Mount Sinai and on top of dealing with her children thought she had a cold that just wouldn’t quit.
She added that at the end of October, the feelings started to get a lot worse and her fatigue became difficult to manage.
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But while abroad with her husband in Australia, things started to take a turn.
She explained: “I was getting to that point to take Excedrin at least one time every day in order to function, in order to kind of get out of bed.
“And it was awful — like literally almost like a labor contraction in my head or somebody taking an ice pick and just stabbing me in the head.”
She added that when she got back home to New York, things only got worse.
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“No amount of sleep that I got would help. I would literally work, see patients, take care of the kids at night with my husband and then try to go to bed at eight. Nothing would help. I would wake up and it was like Groundhog Day — and I would just feel miserable again.
“Couldn’t even go down to get myself a yogurt for lunch. It was that debilitating.”
Hyne noted that she believed it was the stress of motherhood and work that was causing her to feel so run down but eventually went to see a professional.
Her PCP referred her to Dr. Rachel Colman, a Mount Sinai neurologist in Connecticut.
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The doctor believed she had developed chronic migraines however an MRI scan showed that she had developed a massive hemangioblastoma brain tumor.
While it was benign, it was still doing damage to Hyne and had shifted her brain from the center of her skull.
Two weeks after her MRI at the beginning of February, Hyne had her surgery to remove the five centimeter tumor.
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She said: “Just how fast everything moved, from the MRI, to the results, to the surgery appointment, to scheduling — everything was so fast and that gave me a lot of confidence that these are providers who are taking it seriously.”
Hyne also encouraged other women to take their own pain seriously and to get seen by a healthcare professional.
Gerrard Kaonga