A 40-year-old Minnesota woman who survived a brain aneurysm after struggling to call for help with Siri urged families of people with a similar condition to get tested after she saved their lives. Mother and her sister hardly.
“If a family member has an aneurysm, screening should be a priority. […] “My aneurysm had gotten so big that I might not be here today if I hadn’t been checked and treated,” her sister Neerja Patel, 45, told The Sun on Wednesday.
In 2017, Shailja Ambrose, then 40, was said to have passed out in the toilet at her workplace in Minnesota after suffering a ruptured brain aneurysm, a blood vessel filled with blood, British media reported.
Luckily, at the last minute, she managed to contact a colleague via her mobile phone’s virtual assistant, Siri, so that she could be quickly attended to by hospital services.
But before her bleeding, the 40-year-old had never had any symptoms that made her think she should be worried, she told British media.
“She doesn’t have any headaches, migraines or vision problems and she’s never had any seizures or anything like that. It was only when she suddenly collapsed at work that she realized something was seriously wrong,” her sister said.
After she survived, she urged her family to get tested too. That’s when they discovered that his mother and sister suffered from the same disease, to the point that one of the sister’s three aneurysms was threatening to rupture at any moment.
“I couldn’t believe I thought everything was fine and was told I needed brain surgery [sur-le-champ]. Early detection can save your life, just like mine,” said Neerja Patel.
If the two sisters tell their story today, it is because they want to educate the relatives of a person suffering from this “silent killer” to get tested as quickly as possible, knowing full well that 25 to 40% of those affected would lose their lives within 24 hours, according to data from Britain’s National Health System (NHS), The Sun reports.