Eight months ago Alicia Junghans was planning her funeral, right down to the music.
Today she’s looking forward to Thanksgiving dinner with the family, so Junghans took it in stride when she couldn’t get her first choice: a reservation at The Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Mass.
She’s grateful for the feast she’ll have instead, prepared by Big Y supermarket and heated at home.
“I shouldn’t be here,” said Junghans, 79. “Every day is a gift that I’m here.”
She’s lived with the painful, debilitating blood cancer multiple myeloma for 16 years, but it was April 1, 2024 when the rubber hit the road.
A team at UConn’s John Dempsey Hospital was doing emergency, minimally invasive surgery on her, as a large aneurysm had formed in her left carotid artery.
“Unfortunately, past radiation treatment side-effects for her multiple myeloma caused an aneurysm to develop in the wall of the major artery in her neck that goes to the brain,” said vascular surgeon Dr. Tina Kariya, assistant professor of surgery in the Division of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery at UConn Health.
As they were moving wires during the surgery, the aneurysm burst, said Kariya, who had planned well with her chief and team who were already using a system to reverse blood flow, so Junghans wouldn’t bleed out in the operating room.
Kariya switched gears from the minimally invasive surgery and created a large incision solution to perform an extensive open surgery to repair the burst carotid artery and save Junghans life.
“My surgery scar from my ear to my clavicle isn’t even visible,” Junghans said.
The open procedure took seven hours and Junghans received blood transfusions during and after the surgery.
“It’s a relatively rare problem,” Kariya said of the aneurysm bursting. “I was very concerned she was going to have a massive stroke.” She praised the team.
Junghans, of Ellington, who was a registered nurse for more than 50 years before retiring, said of the surgery, “It was like a miracle happened that I went through this and I’m still here.”
She was diagnosed with “smoldering” multiple myeloma in 2008 and colon cancer in 2013 made the multiple myeloma “go active” she said.
Since then she’s had 14 protocols for the multiple myeloma, including chemotherapy and radiation. It has all kept her going, but she is not in remission. Painful and debilitating multiple myeloma cancerous plasma cells can build up inside her body’s bone marrow.
“I should be dead,” Junghans said.
In March of this year while receiving cancer treatment at the infusion center at UConn Health when Junghans said she told a nurse she had a lump in her neck and the nurse told her it was probably a lymph node.
“I said lymph nodes don’t pulsate,” Junghans said.
On March 27, when it was determined it was an aneurysm, a doctor told her to go straight to the hospital.
Her adult daughter came back from Germany where she now lives, and they planned the funeral, as Junghans was told she had a 50 percent chance of survival.
Junghans was on the operating table for seven hours and the next day woke up “full of energy.”
Junghans said she’s a woman of strong faith who believes in the power of prayer and that’s all that helped to keep her going.
She also said of surgeon Kariya, “Somebody guided the doctors hand.”
“It’s just amazing that I’m still here,” Junghans said.
“Alicia is alive and very happy, and it’s very rewarding to see her great success and it’s a privilege to care for her,” Kariya said.
