When pain turns deadly

A day and a half after the pain first struck, Brothers was lying awake in bed, tormented by a relentless headache and racing thoughts.

“I don’t know if this is part of being a woman and what we deal with with our bodies, but I wondered, ‘Am I blowing this out of proportion? Am I crazy?’” she recalled.

By 1:45 a.m., she’d had enough. Weak, dehydrated and desperate, she called another Uber — this time to the ER at Mount Sinai Morningside.

She sat in the backseat as the driver blasted club music, the smell of his air freshener making her queasy as she fought to keep from vomiting all over the car.

When she staggered through the hospital doors and described her symptoms, the ER staff sprang into immediate action. They quickly checked her vitals, administered fluids and pain medication through an IV and rushed her in for a brain scan.

The diagnosis was terrifying: a ruptured aneurysm, roughly the size of a marble, had been leaking blood into the space around her brain. It was sitting at the base of her skull, lodged in the wall of her posterior communicating artery.