Glenn Lilley, 71, from Plymouth, woke up from a fall thinking she was 28 years younger...
Heaving heavy shopping bags in the front door, I called out to my husband John.
‘Hi, love,’ I sang. Back in July 2021, coming home from the supermarket, I barged through the door heading to the kitchen, to put all the groceries away.
But one minute, I was standing in the hallway –and then everything went black.
The next thing I knew, Iwas waking up in a hospital bed.
And there was a man sat by my bedside.
There was a man sat by my bedside
‘Do you know who this is?’ a doctor asked, pointing at him.
‘His name’s John,’ I said, feeling confused. ‘But I don’t know who he is...’
Iknew that he was someone important, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.
‘I’m your husband,’ John told me, looking worried –we’d been together for 53 years, and married for 47.
Then something suddenly occurred to me.
‘Where are my boys?’ I asked, worried.
They were only 10 and 12 – who was looking after them?
‘Glenn,’ John said gently, taking my hand. ‘The boys are all grown up now, with kids of their own.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, bewildered. ‘You’re 69,’ John told me. ‘No, I’m 41,’ I said.
It didn’t make any sense. I’d lost 28 years.
What had happened? It was terrifying, and John looked scared, too.
John told me that when I’d blacked out at home, I’d taken areal battering –my arms hadn’t come up to break my fall and I’d hit my head hard, causing the memory loss.
Black and blue, I was very poorly, fading in and out of the conversation.
I barely even knew my own name.
Thankfully, my memory loss didn’t last too long, and John was by my side as everything started to come back to me.
But I still felt more unwell than I’d ever felt.
Eventually, after lots of tests, adoctor came to see me.
‘You’ve got abrain tumour,’ he explained. ‘It’s benign, but it caused aseizure, which is why you fell.’
I’d suffered from tinnitus and vertigo since 2017 –Isaw a doctor, and Iwas fitted with a hearing aid and took travel sickness tablets for the vertigo.
But my specialist told me that the mass could be seen on one of my scans from 2017, and the ENT specialist had missed the grape-sized tumour –and since then it had grown aggressively, aticking time bomb in my head.
I didn’t blame them –it was just one of those things.
‘They told me if I hadn’t brought you into A&E, you could have been dead within a few hours,’ John told me later – it was asobering thought.
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