BENGALURU: At 16, Sarah Gomez collapsed in her college lab after a severe headache, what many thought was a regular migraine turned out to be a brain stroke caused by a rare condition. Seven years later, the brain stroke survivor has returned to the same hospital that saved her life, this time as a medical intern training under the neurosurgeon who once operated on her.
Sarah was diagnosed with a rare condition called arteriovenous malformation (AVM) and underwent emergency brain surgery at Bhagwan Mahaveer Jain Hospital in 2018. After a year of recovery, she joined a medical college in Salem in Tamil Nadu. Her experience as a patient made her choose a career in medicine. In May 2025, during her semester break, she came back to the same hospital, not as a patient, but as a trainee learning from the doctor who treated her.
In November 2018, Sarah, then a first-year Pre-University student at Mount Carmel College, fainted during her lab class. She had a severe headache, started vomiting and soon lost consciousness. She was rushed to Jain Hospital where doctors found she had AVM - a condition where blood vessels in the brain are tangled and can suddenly burst, leading to bleeding and stroke.
Dr Sharan Srinivasan, Head of the PRS Neurosciences Research Institute and senior neurosurgeon at the hospital, led the surgery. “Sarah’s Glasgow Coma Scale score was three - that’s the lowest possible. Without immediate treatment, she would not have survived,” he said.
Sarah’s father, Eston Gomez, later said she had been having migraine-like headaches since Class 8 but those were often thought to be due to study stress. To prevent further bleeding, doctors later recommended gamma knife radiosurgery - a non-invasive, high precision procedure that uses targeted radiation to treat the affected area. Sarah underwent this in February 2019.
Before the stroke, she had planned to become a pilot but her medical crisis changed everything. “The stroke gave me a purpose. I took a year off to recover but since 2020, I have not needed medication. Now when I study neuroanatomy, it feels easier because I have been through it,” Sarah, who now returned to Jain Hospital as an observed under Dr Sharan, said.