We’ve been taught to believe that if you lead a healthy-ish and somewhat active lifestyle, something like this wouldn’t happen to you.
“I used to go on mountaineering expeditions – I’ve been up Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, Mount Kinabalu in Malaysia and even to Everest base camp. The avid adventure sports enthusiast suspects that her less than healthy lifestyle – going to bed in the early hours of the morning after rushing to meet deadlines – her constant indulgence in desserts and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle because of the pandemic, might have contributed to it. But I wouldn’t say I was overly stressed, so I’m not really sure how it all happened.” “I run my own company, and I remember I was juggling a few projects back then, and also taking care of some new businesses that were coming in. Low said she hasn’t been able to figure out why the brain aneurysms happened, although Dr Han had told her that stress can play a big part, and that women tend to have a higher risk of getting it. It’s funny because it was not like people were trying to hide the situation from me, but I guess I didn’t understand the significance till that day.” “She was telling me what had happened and then all of a sudden, I understood, and I went quiet. Through it all, Low said that even though the nurses, doctors and even Rawson would tell her what she had gone through, she never fully understood it, until one day, when one of the doctors came in to check on her. Low said she was fortunate because the nurses checked on her hourly and caught the stroke in time, and were able to rush her back into the operating theatre. The result: The left side of Low’s face started to droop. “One of the side effects of any brain surgery is that the patient could suffer from a haemorrhagic stroke (where blood from an artery begins to bleed into the brain after a blood vessel bursts).” “I think I was only consciously present in the later part of my recovery, but in-between, I was definitely in and out,” she said.īut one week after the surgery, Low found herself back in the operating theatre fighting for her life once more. Once out of the operating theatre and in the ICU, Low said she was doing fine at first, although she doesn’t remember much of her days there.
“The muscle membrane is elastic, so after they cut through it, it kind of collapsed,” Low explained as she showed me the slight depression near her temple. The surgery took six hours, and for it, Low said that they had to shave her hair and cut through a muscle membrane to get to the aneurysm. Upon cutting into the area, Low’s doctor Dr Julian Han, associate consultant of neurosurgery at the National Neuroscience Institute at Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH), found another aneurysm, just next to the one that had ruptured, which hadn’t come up in the scan. In the brain, it can cause bleeding that can lead to haemorrhagic stroke, or worse, death. The heart and brain are the most common places for it to occur. “I managed to look in the mirror and realised that my arms kept shaking and I was still seeing stars, so he rushed me to the hospital, which turned to be an extremely good thing.”Įven Low’s partner, 47-year-old Greg Rawson, who co-owns the consultancy, had no idea how bad the situation was as she was still able to ask questions and give instructions during the car ride.Īt the hospital, Low was sent for a CT scan and the doctors told Rawson that Low had a ruptured brain aneurysm – and that it would have to be treated immediately.Īn aneurysm is a bulge in the blood vessel that can result from a weak blood vessel wall. This causes pressure to build up as blood passes through, causing the vessel to expand outwards like a balloon. Somehow, Low managed to open the bathroom door, where her partner saw that she had a huge bump on her head where she hit the floor. I recall it being really loud and he was jumping on me, so I think he knew something was wrong,” the 49-year-old recounted.
And when I came to, it was to my cat’s yelping. The next thing I knew, I saw stars and collapsed onto the floor.
“I was in the bathroom and one of my cats had followed me in. To this day, the founder of Wanderlust Brand Communications has little recollection of what happened that fateful day in August 2020. Sitting across from Dominique Low, you would never suspect that little more than a year ago, she was fighting for her life in the intensive care unit (ICU) of Tan Tock Seng Hospital.