Regaining Independence

BY RAND LEEB-DU TOIT

It was an ordinary Sunday evening in February and I’d gone to bed early so that I’d be fresh for an international business flight the next morning. I woke up feeling awful and tried to get to the bathroom. The next moment my wife and son were rousing me from where I’d collapsed. My heart was in ventricular tachycardia and I had suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. I was conscious, but still experiencing a life-threatening situation with my heart beating at over 200 beats per minute.

The formula for weight loss is neither secret nor mysterious — more calories burned than consumed. But if losing weight were as simple as that, then two-thirds of Americans wouldn’t be overweight or obese.

People who learn they have an unruptured brain aneurysm typically have two options: surgery or watch and wait. Researchers hope to add a third alternative — drugs to lower the odds of the aneurysm rupturing.