“My case was so rare, my bleed was so big, it would have been physically impossible to save me if I’d ended up anywhere other than the Royal Melbourne Hospital.”
On a cool autumn evening, just as bride-to-be Brianna was preparing for bed, she felt an explosion in her head. A bang, she describes, that was as loud as a gun. Her body seized, she vomited, and then her world went black.
Brianna couldn’t know she had a rare and congenital arteriovenous malformation (AVM) – a tangle of blood vessels that had ruptured, causing immense bleeding and leading to stroke.
But three weeks later, when she woke from her coma in the Royal Melbourne Hospital’s intensive care unit, she would learn that half her body is immobile, part of her skull is missing, and her unborn baby might not make it.
Brianna was just 29 but life as she knew it would never be the same again.
“I would cry every day; I couldn’t accept that this was my life. How did this happen? Why me? Why now, when everything was going so well.”
Mahali was born via c-section – a miracle baby who survived all odds. But it was bittersweet for Brianna who was still missing part of her skull and needed more surgery, more rehab, more healing. She spent the next 12 months at the Royal Melbourne Hospital learning to sit up, swallow and eventually walk with a hiking pole.
Brianna knows she wouldn’t have survived such an enormous bleed without the care and expertise of our surgeons, nurses, therapists and cutting-edge technologies like our CT scanner that picked up a secondary stroke.
But with more people coming through our Emergency Department than ever before, we’re facing critical delays in timely access to our current single CT scanner.
Our Emergency Department was built in 2009 to accommodate 50,000 presentations. Last year, we well surpassed this with over 87,000 presentations. And our patients do not arrive by appointment. With over 80 patients a day needing an emergency CT scan to diagnose their disease and set them on a treatment path, critical delays can easily occur.
One CT scanner is simply not enough.
We urgently need to raise $2.5M for a second CT scanner in our Emergency Department. This is a vital piece of equipment that provides rapid and accurate diagnosis for trauma and stroke patients like Brianna.
We have the space, the staff and the skills. All that’s missing is the equipment. Please make a kind donation today to help secure another CT scanner. Because when life is unpredictable, our response isn’t.
