A doctor initially thought she was suffering from a migraine, but a brain scan revealed something much worse. Like many people in the world, Andy Pullo suffered a few headaches when she was in her early teens. Similarly, she didn’t seem to think they were anything unusual. However, one day, almost entirely out of the blue, Andy became catatonic. It would be months before she would become responsive again.
It all happened very suddenly one January evening back in 2011, on the way back home from swim practice. Andy complained that she didn’t feel well. Shockingly, by the time she and her mom, Lynn, had arrived home, Andy couldn’t talk or walk. Of course, Lynn immediately contacted her pediatrician. At the time, the doctor was confident that this was nothing more serious than a migraine, but he referred Andy to the hospital for a checkup nonetheless. It was just as well, too, because that’s when they all learned that it was, in fact, something far more serious. The tests concluded that Andy had a rare brain defect from birth called an Arterial Venous Malformation (AVM). Read the full story here ▶
