by Carla Stephens

Created on: November 22, 2008

When your told you should be dead

Isn't it funny how one sentence can completely change your life, this is the sentence that I was told a few months ago, when I went into hospital for what should have been a standard easy twenty minute operation, but turned into a three and a half hour operation that saved my life.

I've had problems with my ears all my life, and I've had several operations over the years as a result, everything from grommets to draining. On this occasion I was in to have old scar tissue removed from around my ear drum as it was causing an infection within my inner ear. What they were to find in there was to be worse than anyone had realized at the time, not only did they remove the old scar tissue, but they also removed three cysts that even a CAT scan hadn't even picked up.

One was over the nerve endings behind my ear drum, (these are the nerves that effect your face). This explained why I hadn't been able to feel my face for years, I had control over it, I just had no feeling down that one side, but not such a big problem.

The second was found just behind my ear drum, causing no more than constant weeping of my ear and deafness, this I have been used to most of my life.

The third one was the big problem. Apparently is was the size of a tangerine and attached to my brain. This of course explained the headaches that I had been suffering with for months, headaches that I ignored at the time thinking they were down to stress of my job at the time, or side effects from my contraceptive pill. Either way I haven't had a single headache since.

I was told that if I hadn't had it removed at that time I could have been dead within the month, in fact by all rights I should have been long gone already. It was the pressure of the cyst on my brain that had been causing the headaches, and so much as a cold, a sneeze or anything could have caused the cyst to burst and kill me. I had heard of tumors and such likes that could kill you in such a way, but I never knew that cysts could be as dangerous as this too. To me it proved that the paranoia I thought I was suffering from on the occasions I had considered going to see my doctor weren't so ridiculous after all, so many times I thought about going and then decided I would be wasting her time.

In my case I was very lucky, I had been ignorant in a way, I ignored the headaches hoping they would go away. The scary thing being, that on the day of my operation, my surgery was nearly canceled by my surgeon, as I was the

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