Far South Coast couple both required brain surgery in one year for unrelated conditions

The ordeal first began for the Numbugga family in December 2020, when mother of five and home school educator Sally Lloyd started feeling dizzy and a sense of malaise.

Shortly after she was diagnosed with a glioma brain tumour, also called a astrocytoma and was booked in for a craniotomy in March 2021.

The surgery was successful but recovery has not been easy, with memory and thought processing difficulties, plus challenges with multi-tasking.

Ms Lloyd was also told she had to remain stress-free, but that's not always easy for a mother of five children under 12.

The youngsters were sent to their grandparents' house in Sydney, while Ms Lloyd and her husband Tom McLeod stayed in in an Airbnb with their youngest daughter Ruby.

"It was costly but sort of essential at the time, it was hard not being around the kids.

"I felt very responsible for all the stress everyone was having to shoulder because of my absence and I could see if was really hard on the kids, but at the same time I couldn't mentally cope with them," she said.

Ms Lloyd put her somewhat "speedy recovery" down to location of the tumour, but her journey isn't over yet with scans still on the cards for the next 10 years due to the cancerous nature of her tumour.

"They're saying it will come back in the same part of the brain, unless it decides to become more aggressive, or pops up in another part of my brain," she said.

The couple made the decision to send their children to a public school after years of home-schooling, and Mr McLeod went back to work full-time three months after her surgery.

"Multitasking in any situation is really hard. If I tried to make a cup of tea and a piece of toast at the same time, I would burn the toast and boil the water over on the stove.

She described it as a "bloody mess," so Mr McLeod made the decision to cut his hours back to assist her.

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Then in January 2022, every family's worst nightmare came true when Mr McLeod started experiencing throbbing headaches.

Within 24 hours, he was diagnosed with a colloidal cyst that was blocking one of the drainage ventricles to his spinal fluid, and taken to Canberra hospital for immediate surgery.

Despite the cyst being successfully removed, after the surgery he started experiencing psychosis for which doctors could not find the root cause.

At first doctors thought the condition would ease within a few days but it did not and finally got to the point where his condition escalated.

"Seeing Tom in that state broke me, it really did," said Ms Lloyd.

"Not because of what he did or said as such that it was hurtful, it was more just the fact that the person you think you know has completely become someone else almost, and the worry that they won't come back."

It got to the point where neither Ms Lloyd, nor their five children were able to visit him.

Over a month later, on March 15, Mr McLeod was finally able to be reunited at home with his family.

"The second youngest keeps saying, 'I wish we could go back to before mummy and daddy had headaches', because that's how she can formulate it," Ms Lloyd said.

"They're all trying to process what's happened. They don't know the full details of what Tom's gone through, I'll let Tom tell them what he wants to tell them."

From what doctors can see, his brain hasn't been physically damaged, but surgeons had to enter his brain through the frontal lobe where the limbic system is located - an area responsible for regulating impulsiveness, behaviours, and emotions.

"He's medicated now to manage his moods, at this stage they're predicting it's for six months. They've said at some point they will wean him off and see how he goes," said Ms Lloyd.

"I'm very glad that they did happen a year apart, because if they had happened in the same year it would have been pretty hard."

Ms Lloyd said she had been in survival mode the past few years and was dealing with pre and post-natal depression, and grief over the deaths of loved ones in 2020 even before being diagnosed.

"The first time I felt like I was getting somewhere was at the start of this year and I sort of started feeling like I was making a bit of progress with my mental health.

"So to then find out my partner had to have brain surgery as well... I'm still in survival mode, I haven't processed everything, I just have to go with it," she said.

Two friends of the family, Katie Sloat Ryan and Kate Patmore jumped into action to help the family financially by way of a fundraiser, as both of parents are currently unable to work.

Ms Sloat Ryan said it hit really close to home as her own father died of a brain aneurysm and she knew what the process of recovery looked like, as her own father was in the hospital for a prolonged period.

"They're going to need a long time to recover and that was going to be best served by not having the financial stresses."

She said the family had a wonderful community of neighbours and friends around them who were helping care for their animals, cook meals, and assisting with housework.

The women have been hoping to raise about $50,000 to assist with their bills and mortgage repayments.

They came up with a GoFundMe campaign called Planes for Brains as Mr McLeod was often seen making paper planes with his children and made them before and after his surgery.

"Tom is just so positive, his attitude is always, "she'll be right"," said Ms Sloat Ryan.

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