Fast Action Saved One Woman's Life

Tawana Gordon of Allentown, Pa., survives an aneurysm

Healthy again, after a close call—Tawana Gordon needed advanced treatment for a dangerous aneurysm. Clearly, she’s happy to be back home with (l-r) her sons Courtney, 10, and Isaiah, 17, and her boyfriend, Barry Gibbons of East Orange, N.J.

The headache that forced Tawana Gordon to the emergency room at Lehigh Valley Hospital clearly wasn’t a migraine or simple tension headache. The 36-year-old Allentown, Pa., woman felt as if her head were being squeezed in a vise, and she had severe neck pain and vomiting. Her condition proved serious indeed: An aneurysm in her brain had ruptured.

An aneurysm is an abnormal bulging in an artery wall in the brain. If the pressure in this bulge becomes too great, it bursts and causes bleeding. More than 30,000 people in the United States have bleeding from a burst aneurysm each year—and 10-15 percent of them die before reaching the hospital. More than half die within 30 days.

Doctors found two aneurysms in Gordon’s brain: the ruptured one and a smaller one that hadn’t ruptured but would eventually need treatment.

“Most people have no symptoms until an aneurysm bursts,” says family medicine physician Narien Grover, M.D., of Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network. “Then they get a sudden headache that feels like the worst of their life. It’s essential that they get help immediately.”

Doctors aren’t sure what causes aneurysms, but they can be hereditary. They’re more common in women and most likely to occur between ages 35 and 60. Smoking, cocaine use, high blood pressure and some types of kidney disease increase the risk for a rupture. “But that risk is just 0.1 percent a year if the aneurysm is small with no history of bleeding in the brain,” Grover says.

Aneurysms are best diagnosed with tests called magnetic resonance angiograms (MRA) or CT angiograms, which provide an accurate look at the brain’s blood vessels. “How the aneurysm is treated depends on its size, shape and location and the patient’s age,” says Grover’s colleague, neurointerventional radiologist Darryn Shaff, M.D.

One option is surgical clipping. The surgeon removes part of the skull and places a tiny metal clip across the neck of the aneurysm to stop blood flow. For Gordon, Shaff performed a new, non-surgical procedure called coiling. He threaded a tiny catheter through her groin artery up into her brain and filled the aneurysm with tiny platinum coils to stop the bleeding.

While recovery from coiling is just two to three days, the bleeding from the aneurysm often causes complications and keeps the patient in the hospital for weeks or months, Shaff says. Several days after Gordon’s coiling procedure, she suffered vasospasm, stroke-like symptoms caused by a narrowing of the brain arteries. A hospital team led by neurosurgeon Mark Li, M.D., elevated her blood pressure and gave her fluids to keep blood flowing to her brain. When she slipped into a coma, Shaff injected a drug into her brain arteries to open them.

The treatment worked. After several months in the hospital, rehabilitation and coiling treatment of the second aneurysm, Gordon feels great today. She’s returned to her job at a New York City law firm.

Published from Healthy You Magazine May-June 2007

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