World Stroke Day: How brain haemorrhage put unexpected brakes on Rohma Theunissen's life

There was nothing spectacularly different about the seventh day of November in 2017. Not at least for Canadian national of Pakistani origin Rohma Theunissen who had made Dubai her home.

Working for a corporation’s public relations and communications department, she was juggling between the pressures of a demanding job and preparations for her wedding that was to take place in coming months. If anything, it was a period of anticipation and hope. Upon reaching office that day, Rohma — then 31 — began experiencing a persistent headache. Could it have been because she’d slept late the night before, she wondered. When a colleague pointed out that she seemed out of sorts that morning was when she assumed that the combined exhaustion of the preparation and work were finally taking a toll on her.

“It was 4 pm. And I was sitting on my desk, and when the headache started to increase in intensity was when I went to the pantry and had a slice of chocolate cake, thinking that eating would resolve it,” she recalls. By 4.45 pm, it was no longer just a pounding headache. All of a sudden, Rohma felt that someone had literally hit the back of her head with a baseball bat… except no one did. Overcome with nausea, Rohma felt she would vomit, but didn’t. The red flag was finally raised.

By the time her family took her to the hospital that evening, Rohma had already popped a few tablets of migraine medication. “I remember walking from my car and sitting on a stretcher. I threw up and passed out,” says Rohma, who comes from a family of doctors and surgeons.

Rohma had a subarachnoid brain haemorrhage and spent the next five days in the hospital before she underwent an aneurysm repair (to repair the aneurysm that had burst and stop the bleeding in the brain) at Cleveland Clinic. What also came to light was the fact that Rohma was born with a brain arteriovenous malformation (AVM) that caused considerable blood in the brain to flow from one particular vein. Since she had never really experienced any discomfort, her condition had remained undiagnosed. Rohma went on to undergo gamma knife surgery in the UK to obliterate the AVM that was causing the high blood flow and had led the aneurysm to eventually rupture. Had that not been done, there was a possibility to experience another haemorrhage in the future. It took three years for the malformation to completely go away.

As we chat with Rohma, now an entrepreneur, ahead of the World Stroke Day on October 29, we wonder what is the human cost of the experience she has had. Shortly after her surgery in the UK in February 2018, Rohma got married. In a way, her period of recovery coincided with entering a new phase in life. But return to ‘normalcy’ was not easy. “I had no short-term memory for quite some time because of which I could not have a proper conversation with anyone. I remember I was interviewing for a job and did not tell prospective employers that I had had a stroke. Once I did manage to get the job, I deliberately kept a low profile at the office. If I had conversation with colleagues, I would write down what we spoke about. It was only after a year that I felt confident about telling them that I had a stroke.”

• Dubai: Expat undergoes life-saving, minimally invasive surgery after brain haemorrhage