Tucson News:
“TUCSON- It was just a few weeks before Christmas when Kenneth Williams started having severe headaches. After three days of intense pain, he went to the Carondelet Neurological Institute at St. Joseph’s Hospital. It was a visit that most likely saved his life.
“It was just implied that I will die eventually if I don’t do something,” Williams says.
The 25-year-old found out he had a brain aneurysm. The news couldn’t have come at a worse time. “My first born was about to be born, I was recently married and we bought a house last year,” Williams says.
He was in shock, but there wasn’t much time to dwell on the news. “Typically brain aneurysms are about less than a centimeter and when they get above 2.5 centimeters we call them giant,” Dr. Emun Abdu says. “He had a 4.5 centimeter aneurysm.”
It was an aneurysm typically seen in patients 40 to 50 years old. If it decided to rupture, Williams would have had a 50/50 shot at survival.
Williams underwent a six to eight hour surgery right away. When it was all over, he was unconscious for days. “I didn’t know anything at all,” Williams says. “Where I was, what I was doing, whether my baby was born or not.”
Luckily, little Zachary Williams took his time. “I just told him he had to hold on for a couple weeks and wait until daddy was ready,” says Wife Jocelynn Williams.
Zachary was born over the weekend and Kenneth traveled from his wing of the hospital, to the maternity ward to welcome him.
Now the family is back in their Tucson home together. Williams has trouble with his speed sometimes and he feels a tingle in his right hand, but he is grateful to be alive and looking forward to the future. “Seeing my wife and my son and being able to be there with him, that’s really all that matters to me,” Williams says.
Dr. Abdu estimates it will take Williams six months to a year to fully recover. She says the cause of the aneurysm isn’t clear, but it may have been caused by Williams playing football when he was younger, or it could be congenital.”