I HAD BRAIN SURGERY WHILE PREGNANT

Carla Hempe, 35, feared she would never be able to see her baby boy

- ASHLEIGH PAGE, CAROL DYCE

Sitting on the sofa watching TV, I rubbed my right eye repeatedly. Are you OK?' my husband Gary, then 34, asked. There's a smudge on my contact lens,' I sighed. It was October 2020 and we were enjoying a quiet evening after we'd put our three children, Alyssa, then six, Ruby, four, and Herbie, one, to bed. There had been a buzz of excitement in our house for the last few weeks - I'd recently found out I was expecting again. Later, as we got ready for bed and I took out my contact lens, I frowned. "That's strange,' I said to myself. The misty blur wasn't on my contact at all - it was on my eye.

I wasn't overly worried as I had struggled with vision changes with my older three during pregnancy. But when it hadn't improved by January 2021, I phoned my GP. 'I'll refer you to the eye clinic,' he said. The next Saturday, I sat in the optician's office having a routine eye test.

Only, as the optician peered at the results of my visual field test, he looked puzzled and asked me to take the test again. 'I think the machine must be broken,' he said. But still, after the second test, he wasn't happy. 'I've never seen test results like this,' he said.

The optician referred me to a specialist eye clinic at Eastbourne District General Hospital and by Monday morning, the hospital had called to arrange an appointment for the same week. A specialist then referred me for an urgent MRI.

For eight weeks, I carried on as normal. Gary and I bought baby clothes, prepared the nursery and even found out we were having a little boy. I did the school runs - by now on foot as my vision made it hard to drive and met up with friends and family.

Then, that March, days after the MRI, I received a call from the Neurology department. There's a mass on your brain,' the neurologist said. A tumour. 'It's crushing your optic nerve.'