Three life-threatening medical emergencies, as told by the people who nearly died from them
I Survived! 3 Tales of Unusual Medical Stories
Published on Jan. 27, 2025
Have you ever faced an unexpected medical emergency that turned your world upside down? It’s terrifying when your body sends you an alarming signal out of nowhere. Three women opened up to Reader’s Digest about their serious medical crises, how they beat the odds and the powerful lessons they learned.
Through their survival stories, they remind us why self-awareness, persistence and advocating for your health can make all the difference. Now, through sharing their stories, they’re on a mission to inspire others to listen to their bodies and never stop seeking answers.
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A ruptured brain aneurysm
—By Melody Wren
Here’s a little-known but disturbing fact: According to the Brain Aneurysm Foundation, about 50% of people who have ruptured brain aneurysms die, and 66% of the survivors have major cognitive deficiencies from brain damage. Luckily, it is extremely rare for aneurysms to rupture—only 1 in 100 do. Unfortunately for me, mine did.
What happened? A decade ago, when I was 59, I woke up at our cottage on the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario, Canada, had a shower, made tea and got back into bed. Nestled in my happy place next to my sleeping husband, I read magazines and made notes for some travel writing I was doing. Suddenly, I felt a severe jolt of intense pain in my head. That was the last thing I remember before I lost consciousness.
My husband woke beside me as I made “weird noises,” as he said later. He tried to rouse me with no luck and called 911. By the time I arrived at our small local hospital, I had regained consciousness. I was seen by a resident, who consulted her supervisor. After a few hours of routine tests, she told me I’d had a “migraine,” and I was discharged with instructions to return in 48 hours if there was no change.
There was no change. And after a day and a half of agonizing pain, I told my husband, “Something is really wrong with my head.” I didn’t care that we hadn’t waited the prescribed 48 hours; in order for me to be taken seriously and not fobbed off as a migraine victim, we returned to the hospital.
I was seen by a different doctor and got a CT scan. It showed dark residue below my brain, which was the iron from the hemoglobin of the blood that had leaked to that spot. I’d had an aneurysm, and it had burst. This was beyond my doctor’s scope of care. “We need to get you to a hospital specializing in neurology,” he said.
I was medevaced to a new hospital, where a neurosurgeon explained that they needed to stop the bleeding in a small vessel at the front of my brain. He would go in through my groin and pass a thin tube through my arteries and up into my head. If that didn’t stop the bleeding, he would do “windowpane surgery,” drilling a hole in my head.
“No, absolutely not! No one is drilling a hole in my head,” I insisted. I then turned to my husband and my brother, who had joined us: “If things go wrong and it looks like I’m going to be a vegetable, DO NOT go to any extraordinary measures to keep me alive.”
My brother said, “You are going to be absolutely fine.”
I wasn’t having it. I pointed my finger at them and said, “Tell me you have heard what I just said.”
Fortunately, going through the groin worked. Once the tube was in place, thin platinum wires were threaded through it until they coiled into the bubble-shaped aneurysm, allowing the blood to coagulate in it and stop the bleeding. The coiled wires will be in my skull permanently. I seem to be in famous company. The aneurysm survivors club include Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones, Sharon Stone, Quincy Jones and Neil Young.
I spent my post-surgery days resting and getting tested. To make sure that I hadn’t lost brain functionality, my surgeon would come into my hospital room every day with a group of medical residents and ask me the same questions: “What is the date? Where are you? Does a stone sink in water? Do you peel a banana before you eat it?” All of which I answered.
Things seemed to be going well. Then one day, while sitting upright in a chair, I started sliding off sideways and couldn’t stop. My roommate called for a nurse, and I ended up in neurological intensive care. It turned out my sodium level had plummeted and I’d suffered a mild seizure. My body was processing sodium correctly, but the damaged part of my brain was unable to keep the sodium levels in my blood at the correct range. My husband and adult children were told to rush over to the hospital, as the doctors didn’t expect me to survive. Revved up on morphine and low on salt, my mind was swimming. As my kids came rushing into my room, all I could think to say was, “Did you bring fruit? I’m craving fruit.”
I didn’t die, but I did end up in intensive care again less than a week later. During one of my cognitive tests, a nurse held up a pen and asked me what it was. I said it was a pen. She then picked up a spoon, and I said it was a pen. A notebook was a pen. Four or five different items, I referred to as pens. My sodium level had plummeted again.
A month after paramedics had loaded me into an ambulance, I was back home. Weak and unable to walk more than a few steps, I spent most of the day in bed.
My recovery was not easy. I had several different types of headaches, including knifelike stabbing, numbing pain, painful bristling and one that was just a steady ache. Through it all, I experienced a constant clicking sound in my head. Later I discovered that it wasn’t something that I was hearing but was part of the repair response itself. If I got overtired, flashing images, like a Rolodex flipping too fast, went through my brain. The images moved so fast, I couldn’t tell what they were, as if someone were pushing a fast-forward button.
Apparently, all this is quite common after neurosurgery, as was the fact that my brain was in a complete fog, preventing me from understanding ideas or comprehending words. I’m a chatterbox who loves spending time with my husband, kids and grandkids. But my brain fog made following conversations nearly impossible.
Because of the low rate of survival without brain damage, there were few guidelines for recovery, so I designed my own. I watched foreign films and read novels to try to exercise my brain. I tore through The Brain’s Way of Healing, by Norman Doidge, which taught me tricks to recover faster. I took walks around the block with my husband that gradually went from slow to less slow. I was pushing myself. At one point, my brother said, “It’s not a race to recover.” But when dealing with a brain injury, I felt it was imperative that I do as much as possible, and I did.
Six months after surgery, the brain fog lifted, and I felt a huge sense of relief. But I didn’t just return to who I was. A friend of mine says that I put my foot on the gas pedal after my ruptured aneurysm and haven’t stopped since. It’s true. I’m more active now, traveling often, seeking adventures and keeping in touch with friends and family.
Recently I had a check-in with my neurosurgeon. He asked if he could continue to track my progress yearly. I asked if he does that with his other patients who are in the same situation. He told me that with the low survival rate, there weren’t many of us. “We will celebrate your 10 years of survival together,” he added. And we will, this coming July. I am one of the lucky ones.
Hallucinations
—By Rishi Dhir, as told to Lisa Fields
There was a monkey perched on the IV drip stand to the right of my hospital bed. It scowled at me, but I wasn’t afraid: A brief simian visit was part of my daily routine. I never questioned why there was a monkey in the hospital. I wasn’t lucid enough to recognize that my mind was playing tricks on me.
On Oct. 24, 2020, I visited the emergency room at the London hospital where I worked as an orthopedic surgeon. An hour earlier, I had developed such severe abdominal pain that I dropped to the floor in agony while teaching a medical education class over Zoom. I couldn’t catch my breath because of the searing pain in my midsection. It felt like a knife stabbing me. I had intense waves of nausea, and then I started vomiting over and over. After the first several heaves, the only thing coming up was green bile. I vomited all the way to the hospital.
ER doctors diagnosed me with necrotizing pancreatitis, an inflammation of the pancreas that causes tissue death. A gallstone had blocked my pancreatic duct, causing my pancreas to become so inflamed that part of it was dying.
I wasn’t surprised that gallstones were responsible, because eight years earlier I’d had a gallstone attack that had caused excruciating abdominal pain. At the time, I’d been a busy medical resident, and I’d decided to focus on my career instead of taking time off to have my gallbladder removed, which doctors had recommended.
So when I learned that I had necrotizing pancreatitis, I assumed that I’d be prescribed painkillers, have my gallbladder removed and be sent home within a few days. Instead, I was admitted to the hospital. A septic infection had spread from the dead pancreatic tissue to my bloodstream, and my organs were shutting down. The doctors didn’t tell me how poorly I was doing, but I was reading my own charts, and I could see that I was dying. For six weeks, I was confined to a hospital bed, so weak and sick that I couldn’t eat or go to the toilet. I was delirious. And then came the hallucinations.
Evil-looking monkeys stopped by to see me every day, but they weren’t my only imagined visitors. Sometimes, I’d roll over in bed and discover a decomposing body lying next to me. Being so close to a dead body should have been frightening, but my mind wasn’t functioning properly. I saw it so often that it became a familiar fixture in my life. My roommate.
The hallucinations that I couldn’t see were the most alarming. Often, when I was lying in bed, I’d feel a sharp, sudden tug on one of my legs, as if someone was pulling me down the bed, yet I was by myself. I’d freeze in a panic, my heart racing. Sometimes when I was asleep, I’d hear a man or a woman calling out my name, trying to get my attention. It would startle me awake, but there was never anyone there.
To pass the time and to document my health, I recorded a video diary on my phone. Every day, I’d talk to the camera about the way I was feeling. Sometimes, I’d have a brief side conversation with the monkey in my room, or I’d complain that some disembodied voice had woken me up by shouting “Rishi!”
My sisters Reena and Ruchi called me often. Sometimes during our FaceTime chats, I’d see something rising up behind one of them and I’d say, “There’s a swan behind you.” Other times, I’d matter-of-factly describe the dead body lying next to me, or I’d reach out to pet the monkey dangling from my IV drip stand. My sisters always played along. They didn’t want to alarm me by telling me that I was seeing things. I had no clue that none of it was real—the swans, monkeys, dead bodies, voices or the tugs on my leg.
About six weeks into my hospital stay, my health stabilized enough for doctors to begin the next phase of treatment: They inserted drains into my pancreas to remove the dead, septic tissue. That’s when I started feeling more like myself. I was able to eat and walk the corridors. I began regaining the weight that I’d lost, and I felt stronger. My delirium faded away, and the monkeys and dead bodies stopped dropping by. A month later, I was discharged from the hospital, and a few months after that I had my gallbladder removed.
Instead of dwelling on what I have endured, I choose to acknowledge how my life has changed for the better. Being a patient—surviving the pain, fear and hallucinations—taught me the importance of being heard. So when I meet with my own patients, I’m a better listener now, more empathetic than before.
I’m not ashamed to talk about what happened during my illness—not even the hallucinations. Everything was difficult to endure, but the experience shaped me into a person who’s more appreciative of what I have.
I tell people that surviving a life-threatening experience is the best mental health therapy you could have.
Exercise addiction
—By Charlotte Hilton Andersen
I had been up since 4 a.m., running 27 miles in the dark, in training for an upcoming marathon. When I completed my run in just over four hours, I jumped into my car, bypassed my house and headed to the gym for my regular workout of high-intensity kickboxing. I would do that for an hour and follow it up by lifting weights.
I made it most of the way through my kickboxing class before passing out.
A friend carried me downstairs, and I lay down on the dirty gym couch. I stayed like that until I could sit up without the room spinning. Even then, I tried to head to the weight room, but my friend insisted that I go home, packing me into my car with a stern look. I thought he was being overly cautious. I was a little lightheaded, sure—I hadn’t eaten anything since the night before. I wasn’t trying to lose weight by not eating; I just couldn’t fit eating in between workouts.
I drove myself home, showered quickly, threw on a different set of workout clothes and went to my car so I could go back to the gym to finish my workout. It was then I realized my car keys were missing. I turned around to see my husband holding them.
“What are you doing?” he asked, clearly worried. He didn’t know I had fainted. All he knew was that I’d been working out since 4 a.m. But that was enough to set off alarm bells for him.
I was furious. And terrified.
“I have to finish my workout,” I said, and started crying.
“Or what?” he asked. I didn’t know what, but I knew something bad would happen. That’s because I was in the grips of a severe exercise addiction—a cross between an eating disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. For me, exercising was the primary way I coped with stress, depression and anxiety … and I had a lot of all three.
It was normal for me to exercise, vigorously, six to eight hours a day. I had four children and a full-time job working in education, and even then, my workouts were nonnegotiable. I sacrificed my sleep, set up a tiny stair-stepper under my standing desk, and any time I took my children to the park, I’d do pullups and squats while they played. I hiked with my husband, went to fitness workshops with my fitness friends, and did martial arts with my MMA friends.
If I’d ever stopped long enough to think about it, I would have realized that my “passion” for fitness had crossed the line into obsession, and all my “healthy” habits were making me ill. But it wasn’t until the day my husband took my keys and forced me to stop for a moment that I actually thought about the physical toll it was taking.
I had stress fractures in my right shin and my left toes. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d menstruated. My hair was falling out. I was underweight. I couldn’t sleep. I was freezing cold all the time—my body fat percentage was an alarming 9%. (As a reference point, female athletes generally don’t go below 14%.) I had terrifying bouts of heart palpitations. My blood pressure was incredibly low. Oh, and I’d just fainted in front of a whole roomful of people. In short, my body was no longer able to properly maintain the most basic functions.
“You have a problem,” my husband said. “You need help. That’s not a suggestion.” He walked back into the house, and something inside me snapped. I was so broken, literally and figuratively. I collapsed on the garage floor and sobbed. Partly because I was upset but also because I knew that if I had my keys, I would still go back to the gym.
The following Monday, I started intensive treatment.
Exercise addiction is more common than you might think. According to the scientific journal Frontiers, it affects 3% to 14% of the general exercising population. The first rule of my treatment program, through a local eating disorder center, was zero exercise. I wasn’t even allowed to walk around the block. I went from exercising for hours every day to nothing. I had to do this for eight weeks, and through it all I cried and raged against loved ones who were making sure I didn’t sneak in a pushup.
I attended individual and group therapy, saw doctors and learned coping skills. I learned why the endorphins released through exercise can be so addictive: They reduce anxiety, even more than prescription medications do. So I practiced other ways to cope with anxiety and depression, like meditation and journaling. I also studied the serious long-term consequences of overexercising—which include death—and forced myself to acknowledge the signs already happening in my own body.
While exercising builds and maintains bone density, going to extremes can destroy tissues, including heart muscle, and lead to loss of bone density. I was barely 30 years old, yet I had the bone density of a 60-year-old. Combine overexercising with undereating, and it’s a perfect recipe for stress fractures. As a result, I had multiple stress fractures in my legs and feet.
The most difficult part of treatment was confronting the “why” behind my addiction. Addictions, at their core, are often a way to deal with pain that feels overwhelming. In individual therapy, I finally had to start dealing with my why.
When I was 18 years old, I was violently sexually assaulted and, like many victims, felt as if it was my fault and didn’t tell anyone. Six years later, married, with a toddler, and pregnant, I had police show up at my door to tell me that my attacker had been arrested after assaulting at least three other women. The guilt I felt was overwhelming. If I’d reported it when it had happened to me, those women wouldn’t have been hurt. The court case went on for nine grueling months. By the end, I was utterly destroyed. Ultimately, my assaulter was sentenced to one year in prison. The next day, I gave birth to my baby.
Being a new mom gave me no time to process the trauma from the assault and the court case. So instead, I took up running. I put my kids in a jogging stroller and tackled the hills aroundmy Seattle home while my children napped. Then once the baby was sleeping through the night, in the early hours of the morning I started running to a gym, where I took up weightlifting.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but exercise became a way of regaining the control over my body that had been taken from me. I was literally trying to run away from my trauma. And it worked remarkably well … until it didn’t.
When I finished the treatment program, I felt fragile and scared, yet hopeful that I could create a new relationship with exercise. That was 15 years ago. Today I walk a fine line: I teach fitness classes part time at a gym, but I also attend weekly therapy meetings. I still exercise every day, but I limit itto two hours max. The injuries that resulted from my years of overexercising have made it so I can no longer run, so I mainly dance, lift weights and do barre, Pilates and yoga. I have regular checkups at the doctor, and my physical and mental health are good.
I have found a kind of peace with my body. Now my goal is to educate others. Because when I tell people I am in recovery for an exercise addiction, the most common response I get is “I wish I had that problem, ha ha.”
Trust me, you don’t.
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Sources:
- Brain Aneurysm Foundation: “Statistics and Facts”
- Frontiers: “Prevalence and Correlates of Exercise Addiction in the Presence vs. Absence of Indicated Eating Disorders”
Originally Published in Reader's Digest
