Waking up in St Vincent's Hospital was a surreal experience for Ben Cooper. or signup to continue reading The last thing he could remember was going to bed four nights earlier but in the days since, he had undergone lifesaving brain surgery and his family had been given the devastating instructions to say goodbye. "I'm still trying to process it," Mr Cooper said.
"I'd had some declining health leading up to it, I was a little bit unwell, I had some stuff going on - headaches and whatever - but the last thing I remember was we had dinner on the Thursday night, I felt a little bit unwell, had a bit of a migraine, vomited and then the next thing I woke up to was four days later in Sydney after having brain surgery." After heading to bed early on September 26, Mr Cooper was unresponsive the next morning. His wife Jackie sounded the alarm.
A cavernoma, a cluster of abnormal blood vessels, had been forming inside his head for some time and had finally pushed too far. Growing over the part of Mr Cooper's brain that controls emotion and memory, it had been silently impacting him for some time. It was quickly determined he needed care only available to him in Sydney, and within hours he was being flown to the city for emergency surgery.
For his children, Will, Evie and Maya, it was the beginning of a shockingly familiar event. Just 12 months earlier Mrs Cooper was flown to the same hospital with a heart condition and complications from an autoimmune disease. It was an event that shook.