A BRITISH woman with a rare condition that means a simple turn of her head could be fatal is hoping to travel to Barcelona for pioneering surgery.
Rachel Pighills, 33, and her husband Guy, 39 have been trying to raise the €150,000 necessary for her rare condition to be operated on – only three surgeons in the world know how to do it, and one of them is in Spain.
She explains that, in layman's terms, her neck cannot withstand the weight of her head, and if she turns her head to the left, she could partially dislocate the cervical column in her neck.
If it dislocates completely, it would be 'like an internal decapitation', says Rachel, and she would 'die instantly'.
Guy says he worries all the time when he is at work.
Rachel wears a collar, but only for four hours a day, since any longer would mean losing muscle mass in her neck and head, which would exacerbate the problem.
Her condition is known as Basilar Invagination, which means the upper part of her cervical column pushes against the base of her skull.
She also has an atlantoaxial instability, or compression of the spinal cord, making it difficult to move her neck, and platybasia, a developmental deformity of the base of the skull which flattens it and pushes the vertebrae into it, and cervical medullary syndrome, which is caused by her craniocervical instability and brainstem compression.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com