Motorbike crash saves man’s life after brain tumour discovery

Tracy Woodward said she feared the worst when she was told her son Jordan, 19, had been knocked off his motorcycle he had bought just a month earlier.

Covered in blood, he was flown by air ambulance to hospital where, after cleaning him up, doctors found he had escaped with cuts and bruises.

But after carrying out routine brain scans, they discovered suspicious symptoms. Further tests revealed he had a tumour the size of an orange which had gone undetected for at least three years despite repeated trips to the doctor for symptoms including two or three days a week of being violently sick.

The 42-year-old mother-of-three, of Owlthorpe, Sheffield, said: “He was not ill and would function as normal but we knew it wasn’t right. We had been going to the doctors over all this time but each time we were told it was probably his bad diet.”

She said her heart plummeted when she was told of the accident in October.

“I’d been dreading this phonecall every second since he had got that bike,” she said.

He was referred on to the Royal Hallamshire Hospital where scans revealed the tumour.

She said: “Jordan had been suffering with sickness from 2010 but doctors told us the tumour would have started growing well before that. I was furious with doctors, thinking that all along, with better investigation, we could have found out what was wrong with Jordan, instead being fobbed off with ‘bad diet’.

“But in a meeting with medics they assured us that tumours are difficult to diagnose and we just had to be grateful they had found the tumour at all.

“All Jordan said was: ‘Am I going to die?’, but doctors told him no, they were able to operate and remove it and at least the tumour was benign and that he was young and healthy so he had every chance of being okay. But we had to talk him round to having the op at first because he was so scared.”

He underwent surgery but suffered a stroke during the 10-hour operation and lost all feeling in his right side. He only returned home from hospital in January.

“He is recovering slowly, although he still cannot use his right hand and has to walk with a walking stick,” she said.

“Through all of this he has been brilliant, he has managed to stay bright and just get on with things. He has amazed me.”