As a full-time accountant, a part-time graduate student and a leader in her church, Tracy Peppers keeps a packed schedule. When she began experiencing severe headaches, stress seemed to be the obvious explanation, even after the pain led to emergency room visits on two occasions.
In reality, the headaches were symptomatic of a latent health problem, which became frighteningly clear one evening in late August.
“I had sat down on the couch to watch TV and fell asleep—the next thing I knew, the dog was going crazy,” says Tracy.
Alarmed by the barking, Tracy’s son rushed into the room to find his mother experiencing a seizure. He ran for Tracy’s husband, James, and they called 9-1-1. An ambulance transported Tracy and James to the Tallahassee Memorial Bixler Trauma & Emergency Room, where tests revealed an intracranial aneurysm in the frontal lobe of the brain.
Fortunately, Adam Oliver, MD, one of the region’s only two neurosurgeons capable of providing endovascular treatment for anuersym and stroke, had just begun practicing in the Big Bend. Dr. Oliver scheduled Tracy for an endovascular surgery the following day. The minimally invasive procedure allows for the removal of aneursyms without an incision to the skull. Dr. Oliver and Matthew Lawson, MD, are the only physicians in the area offering this state-of-the-art procedure.
“Dr. Oliver was sent here for me, I think,” says Tracy.
After the operation, Tracy recovered in the Tallahassee Memorial Intensive Care Unit for three weeks. Dr. Oliver and the clinical staff monitored her recovery and vital signs. Persistent bleeding in the brain called for a second operation, but following two more weeks in the hospital, Tracy was able to begin rehabilitation to restrengthen her cognitive and physical abilities. Today, she has returned to all her normal activities and plans to graduate with her master’s degree in Health Administration in July 2014.
Tracy even recovered in time to enjoy a cruise through the Western Caribbean that she and her husband had been looking forward to for months before the emergency.
“I haven’t had a headache since the surgery!” she says.
“What Dr. Oliver did—performing the procedure, explaining it to where the family could understand it, the sensitivity he showed and for Tracy to come out the way she did—you can’t overstate that. And the fact that Tallahassee now has that capability is wonderful,” says James.
