After a long tough summer and start to autumn, I am finally starting to get back into enjoying life.
Summer is always busy for me as I work mostly in tourism in one of the busiest parts of eastern coastal Spain, but this year we had our most number of bookings and tourists to deal with. The heat of this summer made the days tougher but not impossible, but what really affected my workload was when my life/business partner took ill.
In early July and after a very stressful June for other local reasons, she gave up on most work things and took to resting. That was fine as I know she was stressed but I could run the day-to-day things to keep everything going, and just bother her with occasional questions, problems or longer term planning. All seemed to be going okay while she was still resting throughout August although becoming more physically frail, until we noticed she was becoming more unsteady on her feet and more than a little confused. She could still get showered and dressed, feed herself and the cats, but could not remember complicated work matters and was starting to drift off during sentences when we spoke. It then turned out that she was not dealing with work communication at all, forgetting or ignoring problems reported to her and sending increasingly gibberish messages to staff and clients.
Finally in mid September, and after weeks of trying, a colleague and I managed to get her to go to a doctor, with everyone fearing she had had a stroke or a variety of other conditions. After a couple more weeks of various tests, she finally got a CT scan of her brain - and we were then told that she had to rush into hospital. She was diagnosed with a meningioma in the layer between her skull and her brain, around three inches long and two inches in diameter. This was compressing her brain, apparently at the part of her brain affecting her personality but also causing her confusion alongside some balance and vision issues. The medical professionals did not see it as a time-critical matter though, so after a short stay in hospital and further scans she was discharged for a week of home rest before returning to the hospital for an operation to remove the tumor.
The operation was a complete success, at least until now, but what surprised everyone is how quickly she made a full mental recovery. Within 24 hours of the surgery, her mind had returned to normal, as had the sparkle in her eye, sense of humour, interest in work and social matters, balance, vision and everything. She was discharged from hospital three days after the operation and been at home and back to work for the last two weeks, and everything is virtually back to normal. The physical scars of the surgical entry are healing very well and quickly too, so everyone is stunned and relieved to see her back to her usual self again.
She is still easing back into work and social events and determined not to get back to the levels of stress that she had before, but it is so great to have her back in all regards.