“I wondered, ‘Am I blowing this out of proportion? Am I crazy?’”
Julie Brothers
Her neck was still stiff. Though the thought of meningitis briefly crossed her mind, she brushed it off, assuming she had just slept in an awkward position.
Desperate for relief, she booked an Uber and dragged herself to a neighborhood walk-in clinic.
“I know they’re not particularly equipped to deal with medical emergencies … but I didn’t think I was having one,” Brothers said.
A so-called “thunderclap headache” is a common sign of a ruptured brain aneurysm.
Julie Brothers
At the clinic, she described her symptoms to the doctors and mentioned that she suspected they might be caused by a migraine.
They agreed without running any tests. Instead, doctors gave her a shot of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for the pain, a prescription for some anti-nausea medicine and sent her home.
Brothers isn’t alone.
“Misdiagnosis occurs 25% of the time because of the failure to do a scan,” Christine Buckley, executive director of the Brain Aneurysm Foundation, told The Post.
When pain turns deadly
A day and a half after the pain first struck, Brothers was lying awake in bed, tormented by a relentless headache and racing thoughts.
“I don’t know if this is part of being a woman and what we deal with with our bodies, but I wondered, ‘Am I blowing this out of proportion? Am I crazy?’” she recalled.
By 1:45 a.m., she’d had enough. Weak, dehydrated and desperate, she called another Uber — this time to the ER at Mount Sinai Morningside.
