Heartbroken Fans – GH’s Kirsten Storms Shares Her Shocking Health Crisis: ‘I Was Shocked… They Found an Aneurysm..
General Hospital star Kirsten Storms will undergo surgery for an aneurysm, saying that “my brain seems to be sorta lowkey rebelling against me” amid ongoing health struggles.
Storms, 41, shared an Instagram post on Oct. 14 that while undergoing a follow-up scan for the cyst she had removed from her brain in 2021, her neurosurgeon discovered an aneurysm on the right side.
She shared that in January, she had a procedure done “where the doctor [threaded] a camera from my leg up to my brain.” As she explained, “(It’s a routine procedure, but the path inside your body that they lead the camera through is *insane*… THE CAMERA GOES THROUGH YOUR ARMPIT, guys. Your. Armpit.)
Anyway, because of the *slightly* complex situation with the aneurysm (nothing bad, just not typical), it wasn’t coiled that weekend.”
Coiling is a procedure used to block blood flow to the aneurysm, which is a weakened or bulging artery wall, John Hopkins Medicine explains.
If an aneurysm bursts, it can cause brain damage or be fatal, but blocking the blood flow with the coil — which may be thinner than a human hair — can keep it from rupturing.
Since “neurology stuff makes me feel a bit of nervousness,” Storms wrote that she’s biding her time with her best friend Emme Rylan (who played her onscreen BFF Lulu), “crocheting the most beautiful sweaters, while my coiling procedure is being scheduled for sometime in the next 2 weeks.”
Storms, who took a leave of absence from her long-running role as Maxie on ABC hit this summer to move from L.A. to Nashville with her daughter Harper, 11, shared that her diagnosis was a contributing factor to the move:
“Aneurysms (obviously) can be caused by stress … and since the January scan showed a new, but very small, squatter (aka cyst) on my brain stem — it was clear I needed to change some things in my life asap.
For my own personal reasons, no longer living in Los Angeles was very important to me. The biggest reason for the move was Harper, but a lot of it was for my physical and mental health. And my overall happiness.”
And as the Zenon alum explained in her post, she had two reasons for disclosing her latest health struggle: “I wanted to post this because even though my brain seems to be sorta lowkey rebelling against me, it does allow me to understand that we’ve all got times when things aren’t great.
If we can, we will do our best to do what is best for ourselves and loved ones. Since I knew what an aneurysm was, the scan in January majorly freaked me out.”
She also shared that she felt compelled to clear up some falsehoods about her hospital visits: “A few days after I was discharged from the hospital, someone created a blog post that said I was in the hospital that weekend because I tried to ‘unalive’ myself.”
Storms continued: “I couldn’t understand why a person would makeup something that terrible, when they had no idea why I was really there. There are a few really bad apples out there. We all know that…but there are people in my life who I am truly thankful to know.”
“One of those individuals just made a sh*t load of sweaters with me,” she wrote referencing Rylan. “They are glorious.”
