“There are just no words to describe how I feel. I thought I was dying when I came here.” The 44-year-old Norwegian Lene Kanden pauses and smiles as she shifts a pile of colourful knitting that sits beside her.
Considering Lene is recovering from brain surgery, she looks remarkably well and radiant, the only tell-tale sign of the recent ordeal being her cropped hair accentuated by a big white alice band covering the scars of her recent craniotomy.
“I just don’t want this to be made into some sort of tragedy. My life was saved here in Cyprus, I feel good now. I like to think of it as a sun shine story.”
Lene chats away at the home of a Cypriot friend and old university study buddy where she is recuperating after having had a tumour removed from her brain. Following four weeks in the Iasis private hospital in Paphos, she now feels she owes her life to local neurosurgeon, Christos Kyriakides.
Twelve years ago, Lene experienced the first symptoms of what she was told by local Norwegian doctors were the symptoms of stress. “Every so often – maybe once a month – I would faint. The doctors said it was anxiety and that I just needed to slow down. I was advised to start therapy with a psychiatrist to help me,” she recalls.
At the time, Lene was a living her life as a high-powered business woman with a busy schedule and didn’t really question what the doctors told her. When Lene’s son was born four years later in 2002, her symptoms were aggravated by taking care of her child as a single mum. With her son suffering from serious asthma attacks, Lene would be up a few times a night taking care of him. “It was natural I would be feeling super tired so I never really connected it with something else that could perhaps be wrong with my health.”
As the years went by, however, Lene’s symptoms became far more pronounced. “The doctors sent me to heavy duty psychiatry, but it just didn’t seem to help. They thought the best way was to just talk my way through everything but I didn’t feel like that was getting me anywhere,” she explains. “The doctors were telling me to ‘stress less’ so I thought I needed to slow down. I took a Masters degree in alternative lifestyle, I adopted a Mediterranean diet, I looked after myself, I didn’t smoke or drink. I tried everything I could.”
But no matter what she did, Lene’s situation went from bad to worse as she started suffering from lack of concentration and depression. As the fainting became more frequent, Lene began struggling with the simplest of things in life, including taking her son to school.
By Christmas of 2009, Lene realised that she could no longer look after her son and it was decided that he was to live with his father until her health improved. “I don’t have much memory from that point onwards. My life became like a computer printout; it’s like I wasn’t emotionally present. And when you can hardly find the energy to get dressed to take your son to school, alarm bells obviously start ringing.”
Constantly in and out of local hospitals, various psychologists that she had been visiting began to admit they couldn’t find a solution to her issues and she was eventually sent to a neurologist. At this point, she started to experience severe breathing problems, and come June of this year, Lene fell into a short coma.
After a series of full health checks and scans, doctors found a small benign tumour in her brain. “I could barely walk, my head was going crazy, I needed help. It was just unbearable.”
By now Lene was in the hands of private healthcare practitioners hoping they would be able to provide better help than the state doctors she had been visiting so far. “But the doctors didn’t seem to think the tumour needed to be removed and didn’t see it as threatening or invasive.” Lene was simply sent home and put on steroids to ease her breathing problems.
“As time went by my brain became like cotton, everything was slow, I could hardly move and I was home alone. One day I just became unable to move my right arm and leg, and in a very blurry state I managed to call for an ambulance,” she recalls. “I was kept in hospital for four weeks when concluded I was suffering from epilepsy and carpel tunnel in my right arm. As for the paralysis in my leg, they had no answer for that.”
This past August, Lene was so desperate that she took matters into her own hands and contacted doctors abroad, sending them her brain scan. Lene goes on to explain that the only doctor who answered her questions in what seemed like a logical manner was Dr Kyriakides here in Cyprus.
Determined to make the journey over here for a full consultation, the trip was one of complete confusion exacerbated by her blurred vision and continuous seizures. She needed wheelchair assistance to get to her departure gate.
Meeting Dr Kyriakides for the first time is something Lene barely remembers, but she does claim that he is the first doctor to have ever correlated real physical problems with her symptoms. Apart from the growing tumour in her brain which was causing the partial paralysis down her leg, lack of coordination and seizures, two protruding discs in the neck were touching nerves which blocked movement in her arm. “In such a short time the doctor had checked, diagnosed and confirmed that which the Norwegians had spent so many years ignoring,” she says. Kyriakides advised that brain surgery was of upmost importance, while fixing the problem of the neck was something that could wait until later on when the brain had a chance to recover.
The ensuing surgery at Iasis was not without its complications as the tumour sat in a critical position. “The tumour was located at a crucial position exactly on the wall of the central vein superior sinus sagittalis, meaning it was putting a lot of pressure on the area, blocking the blood flow and leading to all the uncomfortable symptoms,” confirms Kyriakides. “As I understand the doctors in Norway didn’t see it important that the tumour should be removed and they didn’t see it as the reason for her symptoms. From what I understand, they thought everything was just psychological.”
With Lene feeling weak and unsure as to whether she would survive the whole ordeal of surgery, she called all the people back home to say her final goodbyes in case anything went wrong. “It was a very profound emotions experience,” she says as her eyes fill with tears. “The skill needed for such an operation is enormous but I was treated brilliantly. I was put into medical quarantine and stayed in hospital for a total of four weeks. The nurses were spectacular, I was kept infection free, I have nothing to complain about.”
“After the operation her symptoms are now gone; the physical discoordination of the right side of the body, the headaches and the seizures,” Kyriakides confirms. “It was very high risk with high complications, but the important thing is that she is now able to live a normal life.”
Lene herself can’t quite come to terms with just how good she feels without any of the pain or trauma experienced before. “I really don’t know how I got through it all but this is definitely the start if a new life.
“I feel younger, I’m getting stronger by the day, and I’m more in control of myself.”
As she sits back and takes hold of the knitting she has been busying herself with during recovery, she explains that it’s the ability to do the simplest things that now brings the most joy. “Life in itself feels fantastic. I don’t have the strength yet to embrace everything but it feels wonderful to just relax and have a normal brain. It’s the little things that matter.”
