A mother of three discovered she had a cancerous brain tumour after doctors initially diagnosed her with vertigo and a case of “really bad anxiety”.
Police officer Emma Capper, 39, had been finding it hard to turn her head and felt “unsteady” on her feet for weeks.
She was initially prescribed beta blockers for high blood pressure and anti-sickness medication for dizziness over the phone.
A later scan of her head showed a “large growth” that turned out to be cancerous.
The tumour was found after Capper’s symptoms worsened and she began throwing up. She bypassed her GP and visited a local emergency ward, where she was offered the scan.
Capper – who had previously beat breast cancer – was then rushed to a specialist hospital where surgeons successfully removed the tumour.
She is currently awaiting more tests to see if the cancer has spread.
Capper believes she may have suffered for months had she accepted the diagnosis first proposed by her GP.
“If I’d not gone to A&E that day, I’d still be walking around feeling as unwell,” she said.
“I don’t know how I was managing going to work every day. Up until my head was scanned, it was not possible to know if it was there or not.
“Unless the doctors were going to have referred me for a scan, this was never going to have ended.”
Doctors at the hospital told Capper that if the tumour had gone untreated, she may also have experienced seizures.
Capper first raised her symptoms with her local clinic on 11 May. She was unable to get an appointment with her GP. Instead, Capper had a telephone consultation and a face-to-face consultation with two nurses instead.
“I had to turn my whole body in order for me to turn my head without it being really, really painful and I had this weird feeling,” she explained.
Detailing her appointment with the nurse, Capper said: “She took my blood pressure, which was really, really high, and then the appointment became about that.
“And they sent me home with beta-blockers to take as and when I felt I needed to.
“She told me I had really bad anxiety and told me she was going to make me an appointment to see a counsellor.”
After searching her symptoms online, Capper became suspicious that her breast cancer may have spread to her brain.
She said that given her medical history, sending her for a scan earlier on “would have been a good idea”.
“From my reading, one of the most common places breast cancers go is a secondary cancer of the brain, so if I figured that out...” Capper said.
According to BreastCancer.org, approximately 10 to 15 per cent of people with breast cancer have brain metastasis.
In most people, metastatic breast cancer that spreads to the brain has also already traveled to another part of the body, such as the bones or lungs.
However, in around 17 per cent of cases, the breast cancer only spreads to the brain.
