BELLBRAE grandmother Roz Hill would never have suspected that an aggressive brain\u00a0tumour was the cause of her memory lapses.<\/p>\n
Thanks to Victoria\u2019s most advanced medical imaging equipment at Epworth Geelong, the mass was detected and Mrs Hill was spared a future living with irreversible dementia.<\/p>\n
A former teacher and a keen horticulturalist, Mrs Hill said she was regularly forgetting botanical names, and often struggled remembering people\u2019s names.<\/p>\n
The 68-year-old put it down to \u201cgetting older\u201d, but her sister Marion, a speech\u00a0pathologist, encouraged her to have a brain scan.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was initially apprehensive so I kept putting it off, but Marion was persistent,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
By the time she underwent a CT scan, the\u00a0tumour 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.<\/p>\n
Thanks to rapid diagnosis and intervention, Mrs Hill is now tumour-free and recovering well from her surgery.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout MRI the correct diagnosis wouldn\u2019t have been made and left untreated,\u00a0the tumour would undoubtedly have caused dementia,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was fortunate \u2013 we just went ahead and did it \u2013 but many others would not be in that position and no one should have to compromise on health outcomes based on affordability.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Hall said that access to MRI imaging was fundamental for brain surgery.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt 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\u2019re dealing with what is often the worst day of their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BELLBRAE grandmother Roz Hill would never have suspected that an aggressive brain\u00a0tumour was the cause of her memory lapses. Thanks to Victoria\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n