Teenager’s headache reveals alarming risk to family’s health: ‘Saving lives’

Caroline McCaffrey usually ran in the morning, but on Father’s Day 2025, she was feeling tired and decided to exercise in the evening. She invited her mother Kim to cycle alongside her.

Just minutes into the race, Caroline, then 18, was hit with a “really bad headache”. She had suffered and received treatment for migraines before, but this was a new sensation.

“I felt like I had been punched in the face,” Caroline said. Within minutes, she was vomiting. She couldn’t walk, so Kim called her husband to come pick them up. When the symptoms didn’t go away immediately, Kim began to panic.

“I literally Googled, while she was vomiting, the signs of brain aneurysms (ruptures). My husband was like, ‘Do you think that’s it?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know. This isn’t normal,'” Kim recalls.

At an area hospital, Kim quickly voiced her concerns, but Caroline’s doctor was skeptical.

“I was like, ‘I’m pretty sure she has a brain aneurysm or a ruptured brain aneurysm,’ and he was like, ‘I don’t think we should go right now,'” Kim recalled. Caroline was given another dose of migraine medication, but it had no effect.

Hours later, a second doctor ordered a CT scan. This test revealed bleeding in Caroline’s brain. Caroline said she was relieved to be on the road to treatment.

“I think I was in so much pain that I couldn’t even really be scared at that point,” Caroline said.

Dealing with a life-threatening diagnosis

Caroline was transferred to the University of Maryland Medical Center. The next day, she woke up in the intensive care unit with baldness. Her parents informed her: tests had shown two brain aneurysms. One ruptured and caused an aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage, which led to his symptoms, said neurointerventionist Dr. Gunjan Parikh.

This disease generally affects people around the age of 50. It’s a dangerous diagnosis, Parikh said: About 1 in 4 patients with aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhages die before reaching the hospital. 13% of patients die in hospital. But Caroline had been lucky: neurosurgeon Dr. Jacob Cherian had treated the ruptured aneurysm and repaired the damaged brain tissue. Despite delays in care, she was treated “very quickly,” Kim said.

Caroline said she was “really shocked” by the news. It took him a few days to “figure out what happened.”

“Once I did that, I was ready to move forward, to start treatment,” Caroline said. “Once I dealt with it, I just wanted to get things on the road.”

It would be a long way. The drain was still removing fluid from his brain. She needed regular ultrasounds and monitoring to make sure she wasn’t suffering from strokes or seizures, as well as occupational and physiotherapy. She then underwent another surgery to remove the second aneurysm. It took more than three weeks before she was finally released from the hospital.

Find a family connection

Meanwhile, Caroline’s parents tried to understand how their 18-year-old daughter could have suffered from such a dangerous illness. While reviewing the family’s medical history with Caroline’s care team, they realized that Caroline’s paternal great-grandmother suffered from an aneurysm in the 1960s.

This suggested a genetic cause for Caroline’s condition. The McCaffreys were encouraged to undergo testing for other potential aneurysms. Usually, aneurysms occur in about 1 in 50 people, Cherian said, but having a first-degree relative with an aneurysm raises those chances to about 1 in 5.

“Caroline is very young, at 18, to have something like this. So that was already a clue that maybe there might be something in the family,” Cherian said.

Kim was the first family member to be tested. A CT scan revealed two small aneurysms, which Cherian surgically removed in November 2025.

Kim’s husband and son did not have aneurysms, but her sister-in-law had two. Other family members continue to undergo testing, Kim said.

It’s unclear why the family is prone to aneurysms on both sides, but Parikh said there’s likely a genetic component. Cherian said neurologists don’t know exactly why aneurysms form, but they can be hereditary.

“Caroline said to me, ‘Okay, I’m tired of saving lives,'” Kim joked.

“Now I have a reason”

Both McCaffreys are now fully recovered from their aneurysm experiences, although they will be subject to regular monitoring for the rest of their lives. Caroline, now 20, is attending Bucknell University for her freshman year and is starting to run competitively again.

She is also participating in a National Institutes of Health study. The study recruited thousands of patients to study the impact of aneurysms and strokes on the brain over the years. Because Caroline is young and had a hemorrhage typically seen in older patients, the data she can offer is unique, Parikh said.

“It really gives scientists a real-time way to observe what the maximum self-repair potential of the human brain is. It allows us, in a way, to reverse engineer everyone,” Parikh said. “You’re looking for the biological model, and the ultimate goal of that research is to understand how to use drugs or pharmacology or physiologically trigger the exact same healing pathways in a 60- or 70-year-old patient.”

Caroline also took part in a study using blood tests to try to find biomarkers that could indicate a person’s risk of an aneurysm. She has also worked with several charities and eventually wants to start her own foundation dedicated to helping young aneurysm survivors. After graduating from college, she wants to become a nurse anesthetist – another goal inspired by her experience.

“I really fell in love with the nursing staff at the University of Maryland. They became like my friends,” Caroline said. “So now I’m pre-breastfeeding. I feel like it’s a perfect fit for me, and now I have a reason why I want to do this.”