The night before she was due to fly home from a holiday in Antalya with her boyfriend last October, Moli Morgan, 22, suffered two seizures.
Turkish doctors told her it was probably down to heatstroke after spending too much time in the 30°C sun during their week-long trip.
But when she returned to the UK the following day, Moli’s sister, a nurse, urged her to go to hospital for a checkup.
As the farmer from Llanerfyl, in Powys, Wales felt ‘completely fine’, she was shocked to learn that she had a life-threatening 4cm brain tumour on the left side of her head.
‘I had no real warning signs before or during the holiday,’ says Moli. ‘I had never suffered any symptoms before.’
The holiday itself was ‘lovely’, and she and her boyfriend of six years, Oli, 22, spent the week relaxing and visiting the hotel’s water park.
It wasn’t until the last night that things took a turn for the worse when, apparently out of of the blue, Moli had a seizure at around 1am followed by another 20 minutes later.
‘My boyfriend called the medics and they had a doctor on site at the hotel who told me it was probably just heatstroke,’ she recalled.
‘We had been in the sun all day and I hadn’t drank much water, so I sort of thought nothing more of it and we flew home the next evening.’
Moli followed her sister’s advice ‘to be on the safe side’ and was given a CT and MRI scan at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, but ‘couldn’t believe it’ when doctors broke the news of the tumour.
She says: ‘I do get a couple of migraines a year, but obviously that can be normal. It just came as such a massive shock.’
After being kept in for four days having anti-seizure tablets, Moli was allowed to return home. However, it wasn’t long before she was transferred to a specialist neurology centre at Royal Stoke University Hospital to have the mass removed in an awake craniotomy.
While this would be a daunting prospect for many, she says: ‘I didn’t even really think about it, I just thought do whatever you need to do.’
During the operation, she had to repeat words back in both Welsh in English to make sure the surgery didn’t impact her ability to speak her first language, which is Welsh.
‘There was a couple of times I didn’t get it right, so they knew that was the part affecting my language and not to interfere there,’ adds Moli. ‘It’s mind-blowing what they can do really.’
The four-hour procedure – which left the 22-year-old with 28 staples in her head – thankfully proved a success, and further tests showed the tumour was benign and non-cancerous.
Six months on, Moli is still being monitored, but is now back helping out on the family farm, and largely ‘back to normal’.
To thank the medics who saved her life, she and her mother, Carol, presented a cheque for £345 to Ward 228 and members of the UHNM Charity team, which they raised through a carol singing night organised by The Wales Federation of Young Farmers.
‘It was amazing to see Moli and her mum,’ said Dr Erminia Albanese. ‘Her recovery has been incredible, and it’s great to see her doing well after the surgery.’
According to the NHS, symptoms of a brain tumour vary depending on the exact part of the brain affected.
Common symptoms include headaches, seizures, persistently feeling sick, vomiting and drowsiness, mental or behavioural changes – such as memory problems or changes in personality – progressive weakness or paralysis on one side of the body, and vision or speech problems.
The NHS recommends seeing a GP if you have these types of symptoms, particularly if you have a headache that feels different from the type of headache you usually get, or if headaches are getting worse.
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