A woman was told by doctors that her brain was sliding away from her skull and down her spine.
After noticing her hands were tingling, Nia Redman, 33, was diagnosed with Chiari malformation, which means the lower part of her brain was pushing down into the spinal canal.
She needed to undergo surgery to correct it, has since walked over 600,000 steps to raise money for the hospital that treated her.
The finance officer from Wrexham, Wales, said: ‘It’s the last thing you expect or want to hear.
‘It didn’t really hit me at first, but it wasn’t until doctors started talking to me about surgery that it really sunk in.
‘Spending Christmas in hospital wasn’t what I’d wanted, especially as I’m a big Christmas person, but I’m planning to make up for it this year.’
Nia’s last Christmas was spent recovering in the hospital, but that’s not going to be the case this year.
Doctors also found a cyst on her spine, but after surgery, medics learned it wasn’t dangerous and will just be monitoring it instead.
Now that she doesn’t need any more treatment, Nia has raised more than £2,000 to ‘say thank you’ to the staff who cared for at the Walton Centre in Liverpool.
She said: ‘Thanks to the staff at the Walton Centre, my results all look good, and now I’m just getting monitored every few months with a scan, so I wanted to take on the walking challenge to raise money for them.
‘The staff were absolutely amazing and the biggest reason I wanted to do the challenge was because I saw just how much they help people.’
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