A ruptured brain aneurysm was the wake-up call that changed my life

This First Person column is written by Roxanne Beaubien, a writer, student and corporate communicator based in London, Ont. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

"I was at the football game and the ball hit me in the head."

I'm lying in an ICU bed at the University of Alberta Hospital, my head wrapped in bandages, tubes running into each arm. My friends laugh. Clearly, they know more than I do. Three days had passed since I'd walked into the kitchen to tell my roommate about a strange pop in the back of my head before I passed out on the floor.

June 2022 marks the 35th anniversary of my awakening in that ICU bed in Edmonton.

It has been 35 years of headaches, weird sensations on the right side of my body and lost words.

Thirty-five years since a soft pop in my head changed the course of my life. 

As a 20-year-old, I'd barely graduated from high school and had no direction or ambition. I was content to work in a hotel and living to party. After my ruptured brain aneurysm, I became a woman determined to prove that my brain still worked and that I had lots to offer. Instead of being content to live life wasted, I wanted a life that was worth living.

The day of aneurysm — before the three-day void — it was a glorious early June day in 1987. An Alberta big sky day, cloudless, bright and oh, so blue. An eight-hour shift behind the front desk at the Convention Inn, then out to party with friends. Just another typical day. 

Typical except for the pounding in my head as I drove home to Sherwood Park, and the strange need to paint my toenails before hitting the highway back into Edmonton for a night of drinking. 

"I am going to be late," I told my friend Patty, explaining my need for nail polish through the receiver of the phone tethered to the kitchen wall. "I have no idea why but I just have to."

The light pink polish closely matched the colour of the bathroom sink beside which my foot was propped as I started painting. In hindsight, it wasn't a spectacular moment —  there was no stabbing pain, no shooting stars in my vision, nothing but a soft pop in the back of my head. 

"Sit down. I'll get your shoes." My roommate, Joanne, was calm when I walked into the kitchen and told her what had happened. "We are going to the hospital." 

And then blackness.

Blackness until three days later when I found myself talking about a football game that never happened.