Kelsey DeSilva just couldn’t believe it the day her mother had a stroke.

Susann Fuller was just 45 and had seemingly been suffering from only a headache the day before.

“My sister, Holly, called and said are you sitting down,” said the 22-year-old. “She said, ‘Don’t freak out, but mom had a stroke’. I just couldn’t comprehend it.”

Two months later, Miss DeSilva is equally shocked by all the medical bills her mother’s illness has incurred.

“Just one MRI is really costly,” said Miss DeSilva. “And she still needs testing and treatment.”

Miss DeSilva hopes to generate $50,000 through bake sales and other fundraisers in the coming months.

“I’m still working on the details,” said Miss DeSilva.

Mrs Fuller retired from the Bermuda Police Force in October after 18 years of service. Then in February she married American Jeffrey Fuller and moved to Huntington, Indiana.

On June 3, she had a bad headache and went to a clinic near their home. There she was diagnosed with migraines and sent home.

“Later she told me that the first sign that something was really wrong was when she was making breakfast,” said Miss DeSilva.

“She went to flip the eggs and they flipped out of the pan onto the stove. She went to Jeff to tell him and started to have problems with her speech. He was a paramedic for years and knew this was not a migraine.”

Her husband rushed her to a nearby hospital where she was again suspected of having migraines and given a low priority.

While she was waiting in a hospital room, a nurse spotted that something was really wrong and alerted a doctor.

“After that they took her by ambulance to Parkview Hospital in Fort Wayne,” said Miss DeSilva. “Jeff said they must have been going 100 miles per hour. He tried to follow in his car, but just couldn’t keep up.”

Doctors at Parkview found that Mrs Fuller had had a stroke, and also had several large and small brain bleeds.

“Because of this they couldn’t treat her with medication to reverse the stroke,” said Miss DeSilva.

Doctors couldn’t pinpoint the cause of all her problems, but suspected an infection of some type.

While Miss DeSilva, an airline customer service agent, caught the next plane out of Bermuda, doctors started treating her mother with strong antibiotics

“When I came into her hospital room she was sitting on a couch with her husband,” said Miss DeSilva. “She had a breathing tube in.

“She was not the person I knew. My mom is such a strong person. I went over to her and said, ‘Hi mom, it’s Kelsey’. She started bawling and I started bawling.”

But over the next few days the antibiotics seemed to work and Mrs Fuller gradually regained her speech and started to understand more.

Today, Mrs Fuller is doing a lot better.

She is at home again, and a recent brain scan revealed that the smaller bleeds in her brain have disappeared and the large ones have shrunk dramatically.

“Doctors think they will disappear,” said Miss DeSilva. “I am not too sure when. She still has to go in for a lot of test. She also has a lot of prescriptions she has to take. Doctors are still trying to figure out what caused it.”

For more information contact Miss DeSilva at kelsey.s.desilva@delta.com.