Bellbrae woman praises Epworth’s MRI

BELLBRAE grandmother Roz Hill would never have suspected that an aggressive brain tumour was the cause of her memory lapses.

Thanks to Victoria’s most advanced medical imaging equipment at Epworth Geelong, the mass was detected and Mrs Hill was spared a future living with irreversible dementia.

A former teacher and a keen horticulturalist, Mrs Hill said she was regularly forgetting botanical names, and often struggled remembering people’s names.

The 68-year-old put it down to “getting older”, but her sister Marion, a speech pathologist, encouraged her to have a brain scan.

“I was initially apprehensive so I kept putting it off, but Marion was persistent,” she said.

By the time she underwent a CT scan, the tumour was pressing on her brain and she was immediately referred to Epworth Geelong neurosurgeon Nick Hall, who requested MRI to obtain a clearer view of the mass before performing frontal lobe surgery to remove the meningioma.

Thanks to rapid diagnosis and intervention, Mrs Hill is now tumour-free and recovering well from her surgery.

She required three MRIs on the MRI scanner at the hospital in Waurn Ponds, but as the unit is not subsidised by Medicare, her initial and follow-up scans came at a significant cost.

“Without MRI the correct diagnosis wouldn’t have been made and left untreated, the tumour would undoubtedly have caused dementia,” she said.

“I was fortunate – we just went ahead and did it – but many others would not be in that position and no one should have to compromise on health outcomes based on affordability.”

Mr Hall said that access to MRI imaging was fundamental for brain surgery.

“It would be inappropriate for a patient who has no choices to be faced with large out-of-pocket costs relating to vital medical imaging; the last thing a patient needs is consideration of those issues when they’re dealing with what is often the worst day of their lives.”