Happy Living Anna

Happy Living Anna

Anna Maria

Hi. I’m Anna.
(Sorry for bad gramma)
I was fourteen years old when I found out I had a brain tumor in the right front of my brain. For around a half year I have been feeling disturbed by sounds, light, everything that could confuse my senses. Beside that, I felt dizzy in a weird way and sometimes I even had some headaches. This made my schooldays back in time very uncomfortable.

But this one day I went swimming with some friends. I was about to go under the water four meters down, when I felt this huge pressure in my head. It was terrible. I got up and nobody noticed what happened to me. I went home and told my mother about the situation. My mom is a nuoru psychologist. Well the next week we went to see a neurologist and he fought I had some kind of special migraine where the person is dizzy all the time. Later on my head got scanned by a mmr and then we figured out it was a brain tumor. Because we found out very quickly what was going on with me, the brain tumor wasn’t so big. And it wasn’t aggressive which made not being cancer yet.

I got my operation just a few days later. Everything went fine. I was in the hospital for five days or so. In these five days I had to learn how to eat, pee, stand up, open my mouth, and almost how to sleep again. But to be true, I was so drugged in there so it wasn’t really that traumatic as it sounds.

I live in Denmark which means you can go see the doctor as much as you want too and not pay. Well I do pay for it but not how you think. In Denmark we pay really high taxes, but by paying this much it means that EVERYBODY can get a education and go see the doctor and get a free operation. In Denmark we do too have some of the most educated doctors in brain tumors.
So I was in save hands. Lucky me.

Afterwards the operation I was drugged for a month at home at Christmas time. This is 2013 I’m talking about. At the following months I felt dizzy, sometimes headaches, tired, a special kind of puls in my head constantly pumping like a heartbeat and it was not in my ears..it was in my head.
I didn’t go to school very often because of how exhausted I would and could get of it.

The fact that I afterwards the operation was clearly metal normal in all matters and a young teenager girl that could only be in bed all the time, I ended op not getting enough stimulating so I got a little winter depression for over a month or so. Not the most easygoing time of my life but whatever. I have learned so much from all this.

Today I’m doing perfectly fine. I’m having good grades in school, I almost have a boyfriend, i have the energy as before my tumor story began, and most of all I’m happy. The only thing that’s still around is my dizziness. It’s chronic but it doesn’t bother me anyways. Being dizzy more or less all the time is the way I am and my way to find that out for me was to be friends with being dizzy.

Every time I’m sad of something, like not doing my homework well enough or having a big huge discussion/fight with someone, I then again reminds myself of the fact than I’m actually here and not doing my homework well enough or having a big discussin, and if I wasn’t so lucky I wouldn’t be able to have all of that.

Just to ensure you people who I didn’t get it clear here is my symptoms.

Before operation:
Uncomfortable dizzy
Headache
Irritated by sounds and light

After the operation:
Neutral dizziness
Headpuls
Tiredness
Periods with headaches

I take epilepsy medication.
lamutrigin.
It takes away my headaches but not the dizziness. That I will probably live with forever.

Opinions expressed within this story belong solely to the author and do not reflect the views or opinions of the National Brain Tumor Society.