Brain aneurysm: Born with a time bomb in my head at 40 it exploded | Mail Online

The headache came from nowhere. It seized the back of my head and pulsed with a pain I had never previously experienced.

I writhed in bed or paced around in an effort to escape it ... to no avail.

It was June this year. I had been avidly watching the World Cup and the England v Germany match was coming up  -  but with this pain in my head I didn't care about football any more.

Lucky to be alive: The kind of aneurysm Matthew experienced can kill instantly

Sleep offered some relief but when I woke in the morning, I felt like someone had been pounding the back of my head.

I promptly made an emergency appointment with my GP, thinking he would diagnose a migraine. But I was wrong. 'It's probably a thunderclap headache,' he said  -  an excruciating pain that comes suddenly but disappears  -  but as a precaution he sent me to my local hospital, Southend General, for a brain scan.

When I walked into the hospital I had no idea that I wouldn't be walking out again for three weeks  -  and that when I did I would be barely able to speak.

Waiting in A&E, I tried not to move because if I did a searing pain would shoot across my head. At last I was scanned and it revealed what was described as a 'tiny bleed on the brain'. I was admitted immediately.

After a two-day wait, I was moved to the neurosurgery unit in Queen's Hospital, Romford. At Southend, in a general ward, there had been an ever-present murmur of voices.

Now I was in a bay of six beds for people awaiting brain or spine surgery. Needless to say there was little chit-chat.

My diagnosis was a subarachnoid haemorrhage or aneurysm, a bleed over the surface of the brain, which is a type of stroke. It can kill instantly.

A vein delivering oxygen to the brain had torn open. The cause was an abnormal knot of blood vessels in another part of my brain, called an arteriovenous malformation  -  or AVM.

HIDDEN THREAT CAN KILL

• 
  A cerebral arteriovenous malformation  -  AVM  -  is a tangle of abnormal arteries and veins, shown in the scan, left, which have weakened walls and a tendency to bleed or cause bleeding elsewhere in the brain.
  

• They occur in less than one per cent of the population.
  

• They are thought to be due to abnormal development of blood vessels during foetal stage  -  but some can be due to injury. 
  

• Nine in ten patients report no symptoms and many AVMs are only discovered during autopsy.
  

• Some sufferers experience difficulties with movement or co-ordination, speech and memory and even hallucinations. 
  

• The risk of disability from a bleed can be as high as 40 per cent, the risk of death about ten per cent.

For anyone born with an AVM, one day the bomb can just go off. At 40 I was precisely the right age for such an explosion.

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