A 30-year-old man missed his wedding after a “terrible migraine” turned out to be a bleeding brain tumour.
Nathan Vaughan, 30, woke up the morning of his wedding on May 4 with a “bursting headache,” he told Kennedy News and Media via Daily Mail, but he wrote it off as wedding day jitters.
“I took pain meds, migraine pills and I assumed it was wedding day nerves, feeling a little pressure,” Vaughan said. But the pain “progressively worsened throughout the day.”
Vaughan, a police officer, managed to meet his fiancee Katie Glass, 26, at St Thomas’ Church, in the East English village of Holywell, Cambridgeshire, for the ceremony – but he couldn’t make it through the rest of the celebrations.
Nathan and Katie Vaughan on their wedding day.
craighawkinsphotography/Kennedy News
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“I made all my efforts to be present at the ceremony. We went through the ceremony and had some photos,” he said.
But his pain became so bad, Vaughan told the paper, that he had to leave the reception and go to their hotel to rest.
“I felt absolutely terrible. It was the worst headache of my life, just a constant pain in the top of my head,” Vaughan said. “In the end I just went to the hotel room and basically just passed out for the evening. I thought I would never live to see this.”
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“At first I thought my wife was alone on our wedding day. I was lying upstairs [feeling] guilt for leaving her alone.”
But when the pain lasted for two days, the newlyweds sought medical help.
“At first they thought it might be meningitis,” Vaughan said. “They did a CT scan and said I had swelling on the pituitary gland. I thought it was just swelling and they were going to give me something to take it off and I would go.”
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Katie and Nathan Vaughan.
Kennedy News and Media
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Instead, he was told he had a “huge tumor on his pituitary gland” – located at the base of his brain – which had “ruptured”.
“It was bleeding in the morning [of my wedding] so I was bleeding in the brain,” Vaughan said, adding that he underwent a four-hour operation to remove the tumor.
“They told me I’d probably have it for the rest of my life,” he said. “On his wedding day, of all days, he decided to jump out.”
The couple said they planned to top up their wedding on their first anniversary, but as Vaughan joked: “I don’t think Katie realized how soon after she said ‘in sickness and in health’ she would be looking after me. It’s a long recovery process.”
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Source: HIS Education