AVON LAKE, Ohio — Pregnancy can be an extremely stressful process for any mom.
A Northeast Ohio woman thought the stress of her third pregnancy was just causing headaches and total body exhaustion.
Those headaches turned out to be a huge aneurysm on her brain.
She says being a mom is a full-time job.
In this case though—she learned she had to finally put herself first.
It ultimately saved her and her baby boy's life.
"If something would've happened to me or my other kids losing their mom was the biggest worry for me," Mallory Wehage said.
Avon Lake mom of three Wehage's strength and love of her children is tangible.
Her kids are her whole world.
But her entire life was put into perspective after a medical diagnosis 22 weeks into her pregnancy with her baby boy Scotty.
What started as repeated, debilitating headaches turned out to be much more.
Her OBGYN referred her to a neurologist.
"I had a golf ball-sized bulge on my vertebral artery in the back of the brain so that is considered giant at 27 millimeters. So, my risk of rupture was really high," Wehage said.
Two hours after getting an MRI up the street in Avon, she was told to get to Cleveland Clinic's main campus downtown as soon as possible and prepare for the next step and potentially the worst-case scenario.
"The whole time I was in the hospital I was meeting with labor and delivery nurses I met with high-risk OBs just in case we would've had to deliver," Wehage said.
Dr. Peter Rasmussen, a Neurosurgeon and Professor of Neurosurgery at Cleveland Clinic, pinpointed the exact spot and the impact on her body.
"It was located in a very unusual location where it was severely compressing the brain stem, which is the part of the brain at the bottom of the brain that then connects to the spinal cord and the spinal cord. And the lower brain stem was severely compressed," Rasmussen said.
Rasmussen and his team wasted no time and got to work, carefully operating on Wehage and making sure her baby was safe throughout the process.
"Fortunately, the way her anatomy was, the way her blood vessels were put together, we had the option of working inside the blood vessels through a minimally invasive approach to use some metal coils to plug up that artery, supplying blood to the aneurysm and effectively eliminate it," Rasmussen said.
Wehage admits she doesn't remember much after the surgery.
Her priority throughout the entire process was the health and well-being of her baby boy.
"The very last thing before they put me under anesthesia was they had a labor and delivery nurse check for his heartbeat. So, it's the last thing I remember before I went to sleep and the very first thing when I was awoken," Wehage said.
The surgery was a success and months later so was the birth of her child, with a few road bumps along the way.
Wehage says it was a celebration of life and a second chance of sorts in more ways than one.
"I feel really lucky, and I try to not take it for granted now because it's easy to do that," Wehage said.
Wehage says she is eternally grateful for the treatment and care she received at the Cleveland Clinic.
She does a follow-up MRI once a year, but she says she feels great overall.
She admits she had gotten sick with her first two pregnancies, but this sickness was something she never experienced before.
Wehage stresses to all expectant parents not to ignore the warning signs and trust their bodies.
She says doctors aren't exactly sure what caused the aneurysm.
Based on the size of it—they assumed it had been there a very long time and the extra blood flow from the baby was possibly why the headaches were so much worse.
