36-year-old Welsh father, Tom Walker, began to have strange dizzy spells, develop severe headaches, and lose balance easily. “It started when I was in work,” he recalled. “I started to feel really light headed when I got up… I thought it might have something to do with my blood pressure.”
It was only when Walker fainted one night as he was putting his two sons to bed that he decided to return to his doctor. “My wife was out at the time,” Walker remembered of that night, “which was frightening.”
When he went to see his doctor, however, his doctor simply wrote off these symptoms as being caused by an infection. Walker was sent home with a prescription and nothing more.
Walker was good about taking his medication, but the symptoms persisted, and he also began to experience strange mood swings.
He was lying awake in bed one night, unable to fall asleep because of a headache, when a thought occurred to him, “A friend of mine’s four-year-old daughter was diagnosed with having a brain tumor and he posted a bit of information about her symptoms on his page. I also read about a colleague who had a brain tumor and posted about it on Facebook too.
“And then something just twigged.”
Walker went back to his doctors the next day to ask to be referred for a scan. That was when, finally, a neurologist discovered that Walker had swollen disks in his eyes – as well as a six-centimeter tumor growing on the fluid cavity at the back of his brain.
His doctor had him scheduled for a procedure two weeks later to have the tumor removed. Walker’s doctors went in through the back of his neck, into his skull, to carefully take the tumor out.
There were many risks inherent in this procedure, since the tumor was attached to Walker’s brain stem, but thankfully, the procedure went without hitch, and Walker has been deemed tumor-free.
His doctors are still having him undergo precautionary radiation therapy to ensure the tumor doesn’t return, but thus far, Walker’s monitoring scans have all been clean.
Walker has since, like his friends, shared his experience on Facebook in hopes that his own post can help someone else, “If it hadn’t been for others posting about similar experiences on Facebook I wouldn’t have pushed for a scan, and may not be here today.”
