Wife Thought She Had a Bad Hangover, But It Was Actually a Brain Tumor

After a night of heavy drinking in 2019, Danielle Freeman, 23, suffered her first grand mal seizure while on duty at McDonalds.

“I was on the headset at the drive-thru and all of a sudden I made a screaming noise,” she said.

“I don’t remember anything about this, but my friend and my roommate both worked at McDonald’s and came running up.

“I slowly started to fall to the ground and a manager caught me.

“I now know that it was a ‘grand mal’ seizure, one that caused loss of consciousness and violent muscle contractions and lasted more than two minutes. I then passed out for another five.

“When I woke up there was a paramedic, my friend and my manager all standing over me and I had no idea what was going on. I felt so dizzy.’

Danielle, now a personal trainer and pediatrician who lives in Portree on the Isle of Skye, was taken to hospital where she was referred for an MRI scan, which took five months to arrive.

Her doctors assumed the seizure was caused by too much alcohol and told Danielle to take it easy on nights out.

“I felt really bad,” she said. “As if it were my fault.”

Later in the year, in December, she went on another night out, following her doctor’s advice to drink no more than four glasses and take breaks in between.

However, the next morning, her boyfriend Connor, 26, told her she had another seizure in her sleep.

“Compared to the first attack, I didn’t really feel anything,” she recalled.

“I just felt like I was waking up from a normal sleep.

“I felt tired from the night out, but then I stopped drinking right away.”

When she received the letter with the results of her MRI scan in early 2020, Danielle quickly learned that alcohol and partying were not the cause of her seizures – it was actually a pea-sized brain tumor that had been around for more than a decade. seven years.

“I got a letter and it said there was a benign mass on my right temporal lobe,” she recalls.

“Because it was benign, I wasn’t as concerned as I could have been.

“But knowing there was something in my head that shouldn’t be there was horrible.”

It turned out that her symptoms had nothing to do with her lifestyle, but the tumor kept her brain from processing the hangovers.

Initially, Danielle refused surgery to have the tumor removed and managed her symptoms with daily anti-seizure drugs. She continued to follow a healthy lifestyle and gave up alcohol completely.

But in late 2020, a scan revealed that the tumor was growing and Danielle was diagnosed with a grade two brain tumor.

She decided to go for the surgery.

Initially deemed non-urgent, Danielle’s case escalated when her vision became blurred in January 2021, caused by the tumor pressing on her brain.

By April 2021, only due to Covid restrictions, she underwent the five-hour procedure to have the tumor removed.

And thanks to her healthy lifestyle, Danielle was discharged after three days of recovering so quickly.

She then received six weeks of radiotherapy and has been receiving chemotherapy for 12 months since August.

“My energy level is so much better now. I exercise a maximum of five days a week,” says Danielle.

“The chemotherapy can make me tired, but I feel so much better.

“I can even have a drink now and then, but I just have to make sure I’m taking my epilepsy medication.”

With her treatment set to end soon, Danielle is now helping to promote The Brain Tumor Charity’s Better Safe Than Tumor campaign, which launched this week.

It aims to raise awareness of the signs and symptoms of brain tumors, including persistent and severe headaches, vision changes, seizures, balance problems or dizziness, memory problems, nausea and vomiting, fatigue, loss of taste and smell, speech difficulties and numbness or tingling in the extremities.

It also highlights the importance of linking symptoms, knowledge that would have been very helpful to Danielle.

“More awareness of the signs and symptoms of brain tumors would have kept me from blaming myself so much,” she said.