James Greenwood is a 42 year old man who resides in Wales who started suffer from “constant” dizziness and headaches. Doctors told him his headaches and dizziness were probably due to dehydration or a migraine, but They gave him between 12 and 18 months to live after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.
It all started one day while he was talking with his brother-in-law. “My vision was wavering a little and I needed to sit down for a while“, the protagonist explained to PA Life. “I’ve always been healthy, so I thought it was something unusual.”
He decided to make an appointment with his doctor and was told that his symptoms could be related to dehydration and that he may have an eye check pending because he wears glasses and spends many hours in front of the computer.
Greenwood underwent blood work and an EKG which measured the electrical activity of the heart. Later, had an “unusual episode” in Manchester, “I was walking around the city and it was like an out-of-body experience: everything around me was slowing down, which worried me,” he explained.
The same day, he made an appointment with his family doctor and he told him that These were symptoms of a migraine. “I’d never had migraines before, so I was skeptical,” says Greenwood. “Just like at the first GP appointment, I insisted on having some kind of scan done on him – maybe it was a sixth sense or something, but I “I knew how I felt and what I wanted most was to calm down.”
You medications prescribed to relieve migraine and was told to make another appointment at the end of the week if it did not have the desired effect. However, a week later, Greenwood woke up around five a.m. to a “severe” headache which pushed him to go to the emergency room, and after “insistently” asking for a CT scanthey discovered a mass the size of a walnut in hisright temporal lobe of the brain.
Two weeks later, he underwent surgery to remove the tumor and learned it was grade four glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer, with a prognosis between 12 and 18 months. “There are days where you have to pinch yourself and wonder if this is actually happening,” Greenwood says.
After six weeks of chemotherapy and radiotherapyGreenwood is waiting to see if the treatment has improved his prognosis, before starting more intensive chemotherapy at the end of October. “I think everyone is probably guilty of taking people for granted, your loved ones, your friends, your family, but it had the effect of reconnecting with some old friends, I think it brought the family closer together. It changes your point of view and it’s a bit cliché, but we try to savor every moment.”
