Lauren Macpherson was on the train home from a musical festival on August bank holiday last year when a bag fell on the 29-year-old’s head from the overhead storage.
A woman has revealed how a freak accident which saw a suitcase fall on her head led to her being told she has just 10 years to live.
Lauren Macpherson was on the train home from London after going to a musical festival on August bank holiday last year when a bag fell on the 29-year-old’s head from the overhead storage. She had swelling and went to get checked out at hospital only to be told that she had unknowingly been living with terminal brain cancer.
Lauren says she had been suffering emotional disregulation but put it down to thinking she had undiagnosed ADHD.
The impact of the suitcase caused a lot of swelling, so Lauren was taken off the train at Swindon for the initial scan, before an MRI in Cardiff two days later when she was told it appeared to be a brain tumour.
But doctors soon told her they had found a “shadow” on her scans which turned out to be cancer.
“It’s like the floor just drops from beneath you, you don’t know what to do, it’s horrible,” said Lauren, who has been told she can expect to live for about 10-12 years.
Lauren said she had been suffering with her emotions and feeling tired and had been to her GP three times for various tests, as she was also experiencing gut issues and blackouts.
The fatigue was so bad Lauren moved from full time to part-time work as a cardiographer so she could manage her studies for her master’s degree.
When doctors told her about the shadow on the CT scan, Lauren said she “knew straight away”.
“There is an instinct inside you and when you have been feeling unwell, it just all made sense,” she added. It’s almost like a relief, you think you’re going crazy, all these things going wrong. To be honest I was quite naive… I was worried but at this point I wasn’t scared.
“I didn’t think at this point, it’s incurable, I just thought ‘they’ve found it, they can get rid of it’.”
The next appointment with her consultant was a month later, when the severity of her diagnosis became clear. Doctors suspected she had Glioblastoma, a fast-growing tumour that would mean she could have just two years to live if it was aggressive.
She said: “We did not expect it at all. Then it kind of hit me and that’s when you’re like, ‘oh my god, you could be looking at two years.”
Doctors put Lauren forward for surgery but told her the wait on the NHS was four months so she opted to go private which was a three week wait.
A spokesperson for Cardiff and Vale University Health Board said patients were assessed “in line with their clinical need” and prioritised cancer cases to “ensure they receive their surgery and treatment as soon as possible”.
They added: “In Lauren’s case this would have been organised soon after she was assessed as fit and completed her pre-operative tests. However, Lauren ultimately made the decision to seek treatment privately.”
Lauren had brain surgery at the end of October, which successfully removed about 80% of the tumour.
A biopsy then confirmed she had a grade two oligodendroglioma, a rare, fast-growing incurable brain tumour, but it had been caught early.
“It’s almost like somebody had given me a new brain, it was really strange, nothing made sense, I didn’t feel like me,” said Lauren.
With the tumour in the speech cortex of her brain, Lauren was unable to speak for weeks after surgery and lost a lot of her cognitive function.
Her recovery took time and she had days where she would have sickness and vertigo.
“I underestimated how difficult the first month would be, I just wanted to start feeling OK.”
Wanting to speak to others going through the same experience, Lauren started an Instagram page to raise awareness and document her journey.
“You just want to talk to people and see how everyone else is doing and how other people feel,” she said.
Lauren will need scans every three months to monitor her tumour and is in the process of going through fertility treatment before starting a private treatment of vorasidenib, a less aggressive treatment option not currently available on the NHS.
“Medicine is excelling at a rate it has never done before, AI is taking over as we know, so I’m really hopeful on that front.”
But she admitted to having “these moments with your family where you break down and you can’t breathe The whole thing has been hard for me… but for family, it’s almost been harder for them.
“I think everyone always says ‘I wish it was me, not you’ but I could really see it with them, constantly the pain in their eyes, because they wanted it to be them not me.
“It was really, really, hard, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, having to deal with that.”