Popular Nigerian actress and filmmaker Abimbola Craig, who starred in the hit film “Skinny Girl in Transit” among other films, has opened up about the arduous procedures she had to go following brain surgery in 2014, stating that she genuinely thought she wouldn’t make it.
She discussed her experience when the doctors determined that she needed surgery to remove a brain tumour in a recent YouTube video.
But the tumor’s excision brought up another problem. Craig recognised she was having an adverse reaction to the painkillers not long after the treatment. Says she:
“Four days after the surgery I started feeling weird but I couldn’t explain what it was that was wrong with me. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep and I also started losing my appetite and started losing weight.
I thought maybe it was the strong pain medication I was on.”
She discovered that she was having sadness, hallucinations, and insomnia after researching the medication’s negative effects online. She was also allowed to switch to a less potent painkiller after calling the hospital, but by then she had already shed ten kilogrammes.
Craig recalled a particularly excruciating procedure she endured after her surgery, the lumbar puncture. She said:
“I remember my last visit. I was still throwing up so much that Mum tried to reach my doctor but couldn’t.
At this time I was doing a lumbar puncture, I had 4 that day. Lumbar punctures are like spinal taps. So they tell you to bend and take fluids from the spine and the reason why they did this is because they still didn’t know what was wrong with me so they thought I had meningitis.”
After conducting tests, It was discovered that she had simply contracted malaria during her visit to Nigeria.
She was immediately treated for malaria and was on the road to recovery.
Abimbola Craig continued:
“10 years after my surgery, I am alive. I am healthy and doing things I never thought I’d be able to do again. I thought I was going to die, not even from the brain surgery. It was during the period of the lumbar puncture, not sure if I had meningitis and all. I literally thought I was going to die.”
