TRIUMPH AFTER MY TUMOURS

She's had a quarter of her brain removed, but that hasn't stopped Amy from obtaining her PhD

- ROXANNE MOONEYS

SHE’S the picture of health – glowing skin, glossy hair, beaming smile. And as she walked to the stage to collect the Ph.D. degree she’d worked so hard for, nobody would’ve been able to tell she has four titanium plates in her skull nor know that 25% of her brain was removed when she was in her teens.

Amy Martin’s achievement is nothing short of inspirational.

She was 14 when her health issues started, the 33-year-old tells us from her family’s home in Moorreesburg in the Western Cape. She was sitting at the dinner table with her parents, Lilian and Barry, and younger sister, Nina, when something strange happened.

“The fork suddenly fell from my hand and I couldn’t move my left side,” Amy recalls. “When I tried to tell my parents what I was experiencing, I suddenly couldn’t speak properly.”

They were living in Cape Town’s northern suburbs at the time and Barry and Lilian took her to their GP the next day. They were referred to a neurologist, who sent her for an MRI scan.

They didn’t think it would turn out to be anything serious, so Amy and her parents were stunned when they were told she had juvenile pilocytic astrocytoma (JPA), a rare childhood brain tumour.

They desperately hoped surgery would put an end to her problems but it was just the start. Two years after the op she started suffering frequent epileptic seizures, which were the result of all the damage the tumour had caused her brain before it was removed.

The fits struck at any time – sometimes at school – causing her to blackout. It became so severe she was sometimes having two seizures a day.