Woman discovered she has terminal brain cancer after a suitcase fell on her head

A woman discovered she had terminal brain cancer after a freak accident on a train that saw a suitcase fall on her head.

Lauren Macpherson, 29, had been travelling home to Cardiff from a music festival during the August bank holiday last year when the 16kg case dropped from the overhead storage.

She was taken off the train and rushed to hospital in case the impact may have fractured her spine or caused a concussion.

But a CT scan revealed a shadow on her brain and doctors eventually diagnosed a tumour, telling her she can expect to live for between 10 and 12 years.

Lauren told the BBC of the prognosis: ‘It’s like the floor just drops from beneath you, you don’t know what to do. It’s horrible.’

She said: ‘As he said it, I just knew, because I’ve been having all these symptoms building up, especially over the last two years, and it just clicked.

‘There is an instinct inside you, and when you have been feeling unwell, it just all made sense.’

Lauren had been suffering from a series of symptoms such as extreme fatigue, bad memory, emotional dysregulation, stomach pain and headaches, but believed it was linked to her ADHD.

‘It’s almost like a relief, you think you’re going crazy, all these things going wrong,’ she said.

‘I would have such bad days where I literally couldn’t get out of bed. Like nobody would understand.’

Doctors initially feared the worst and told Lauren she may have less than a year to live until a biopsy could be carried out.

She said: ‘I just kept saying, “just give me my 30s”, like I’ll be grateful for anything just as long as I get my thirties and it gives me time to just say goodbye and have a bit of a life.

‘That’s all I could think about. I couldn’t think of anything else, it was just get through it, to get through my thirties and that is all. I couldn’t process two to three years.’

The biopsy revealed she suffered from oligodendroglioma and she was told the average life expectancy of this kind of tumour is around 10 to 12 years.

Lauren is now planning to live life to the full and is planning a wedding to boyfriend Zak and a trip to Italy to mark her 30th birthday.

‘My mindset is more hopeful and positive, realistic even. Like for example I’ve just been approved for this new drug, and it’s only come out in the last two years, so this new drug has shown amazing kinds of data. That’s just one drug, and it’s completely changed people’s lives already,’ she said.

‘So, I think what could happen in the next ten years that could then take my chances of survival to 15 years and then it’s 20 years, and then before I know it I am living until I’m like 90.

‘I mean like that is the hope, that even if it’s not curable, it’s pushed and pushed and pushed further away that you can almost live a pretty normal life.

‘The whole thing has been hard for me but for family, it’s almost been harder for them.

‘I think everyone always says “I wish it was me not you” but I could really see it with them, constantly the pain in their eyes, because they wanted it to be them not me.

‘It was really, really, hard, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, having to deal with that.’

Lauren has been raising money for Brain Tumour Research and has already raised more than £2,800 by walking 10,000 steps a day.

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