When Kirsty's nipples started to leak, it was the first clue something was very wrong.

When 26-year-old Kirsty Lane began experiencing headaches, mood swings and irregular periods, she initially put it down to stress.

However Lane – who was studying nursing at the time in the UK – was encouraged to go to the doctor by her husband Mark because the mood swings, he said, were out of character.

“My mood was awful. I was constantly stroppy and really low,” Kirsty told Metro.

“Mark had to sit me down and say that being a moody mare just wasn’t like me at all.

“With the headaches and the fact I wasn’t menstruating, he knew something wasn’t right.”

But it was when Kirsty’s nipples began to leak that the nursing student recognised something may be awry. Armed with a litany of symptoms, she headed to the doctor in 2014, only to be told her contraceptive pill was to blame.

She went off the pill for a year, and yet, nothing had changed. Her symptoms, she says, only worsened.

After heading back to the doctor, and receiving more blood tests, doctors finally came to a conclusion: It was a brain tumour.

"Just hearing the word tumour made me panic," she told Metro.

"That was really the only thing I listened to. I heard the words tumour and brain and I just thought I was dying. It was so awful. I left the surgery and just sobbed and sobbed."

The tumour, she notes, was small and could be treated with medication.

Today, she is well, and raising money for Pituitary Awareness Month, after the leakage from her nipplies piqued her concern.

The brain tumour had, after all, caused her pituitary gland to produce too much prolactin – the hormone which stimulates milk production after childbirth.