A year ago, Shamsah Momin was in her bedroom closet, helping her husband pick out a shirt before going out to dinner. He saw her eyes roll backwards. He grabbed her hand so she wouldn’t hit her head as she began to fall back.
He called 9-1-1 to get an ambulance. That’s when her breathing became irregular and she vomited. That was Sept. 3, 2016.
Shamsah Momin, with her daughter Samayra, had an aneurysm that ruptured last September. Doctors were able to repair it using a Pipeline Flex embolization device. Family photo
A few days later she woke up in Brackenridge Hospital after doctors put a drain into her head to relieve the pressure caused by a brain bleed from very large wide-neck aneurysm. While she was unconscious, doctors also used a balloon-assisted coil embolization to divert the blood flow to that aneurysm.
After more than two weeks in the hospital, Momin was released, but Dr. Ramsey Ashour, a neurosurgeon at Seton Brain & Spine Institute, knew that the aneurysm would likely bleed again. Doing another coil embolization wasn’t a good option because he would need to use so many coils because of the aneurysm’s size and the coils might go somewhere they shouldn’t and cause a stroke.
Dr. Ramsey Ashour is a neurosurgeon at Seton Brain & Spine Institute. Seton Healthcare Family
Instead, after Momin healed for a few months, she returned to the hospital in December. There Ashour used a Pipeline Flex embolization device, which is a piece of wire mesh that goes into the blood vessel with the weakened wall (aneurysm). The mesh strengthens the vessel while cutting off the blood flow to the aneurysm. The aneurysm shrinks after a few weeks and won’t bleed again.
“It’s really a game changer with wide-neck, large aneurysms,” Ashour said. “We never had a good solution before.”
This device was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2015; an earlier version was approved in 2011. Ashour had to become trained on it and approved to use it.
Momin has a good idea of why this happened to her. She, like many moms, didn’t take care of herself. When she was pregnant with her second child, she had high blood pressure that never really went away, she says. “After it became normal after delivery, I stopped taking medication and stopped monitoring it,” she says. “I didn’t know it was going back up again.”
The last well-check she had had was when her daughter was a few months old. At the time her aneurysm bled, her daughter was 3.
“High blood pressure does run in my family,” she says. Her uncle, dad and grandfather all have had it.
What high blood pressure does is put chronic stress on the vessels, which could be the reason why one of them weakens and then ruptures. Other risk factors include smoking, being African American or Latino, and drug use. Aneurysms are more common in women then men in a 3 to 2 ratio, which might be related to hormones.
Ashour estimates that about 3 percent to 5 percent of Americans have an aneurysm right now and about 30,000 rupture each year. About half of those people will die from it. About two-thirds who do live will have some sort of permanent damage.
“Those are sobering numbers,” he says.
An aneurysm is often described by patients “as the worst headache in someone’s life,” Ashour says. “It’s a severe, stabbing, sharp headache.” They also become disoriented and have neck stiffness. They could have vision problems or seizures. “It’s very memorable.”
Momin is lucky. She doesn’t have any permanent damage, but she does tire easily. At first, she had trouble with her vision because of the bleed pressing on her optic nerve. Her family had to help her for a while doing every day things like take her kids to school and other activities as well as care for her. “I really became dependent,” she says. “I had always been super mom.”
Her advice is to not put off regular check-ups. Because she’s only 36, she’ll now be monitored regularly to look at this spot as well as for future aneurysms developing.
