KARREN BRADY, the managing director of Birmingham City, is to have brain surgery early next week after an aneurysm was diagnosed on Wednesday.

The first lady of second-city football, who not once but twice sold her husband, Paul Peschisolido, the Canada striker, expects to be out of action for a month. Brady, 36, had been suffering from sickness for a fortnight and, after coming out in hives on her arms, went for tests at a London hospital. The condition was detected in sufficient time to operate safely.

“This is a big shock to me and my family but I am in capable hands and diagnosing the condition early is very encouraging,” Brady said. “I would like to thank everybody for their messages of support and I plan to be back at work as soon as I can.”

David Gold, the Birmingham chairman, said: “She rang me this morning when I was having my breakfast and said, ‘I’ve got to go into hospital on Monday. Perry Deakin will be looking after the ship while I’m away and I’m having brain surgery’. I nearly fell off my chair. All I can say is that she became the first lady of football through her determination, strength of character and resolve and those are the qualities that will help her through this difficult, testing time. We are all confident and upbeat.”

In her absence, Deakin, the commercial director, and Roger Bannister, financial director, will jointly assume her responsibilities. Bannister has just returned from similar surgery.

At 23, Brady became the first woman to be appointed as the managing director of an English league club in 1993, sweeping into St Andrew’s and making her presence felt in boardrooms around the country, breaking down the sexual stereotyping that her glamorous appearance attracted.

She recalled one occasion, weeks into her football career, when a player said, “I can see your tits in that shirt”. “I swung round, stared at him and said, very calmly, ‘Don’t worry, when I sell you to Crewe, you won’t be able to see them from there, will you?’ ” she said. “The blood drained from his face and, soon after, he was sold.”

She was once refused entry to the Notts County boardroom, for daring to be a woman, but her outspokenness has frequently opened doors for her. In her national newspaper column, she suggested that Footballers’ Wives is insufficiently pumped up. “In real life,” she wrote of her experiences, “the heels are higher, the lips plumper, the boobs bigger, the hair fancier, the jewels clunkier, the fingernails longer and the deals craftier.”

Known, she has acknowledged, as “one hard bastard”, she had no compunction about selling Peschisolido to Stoke City in 1994. And then, after bringing the player back to St Andrew’s, selling him to West Bromwich Albion at a profit of £200,000 three months later. “He wasn’t best pleased the second time,” she said.

Peschisolido is now with Derby County and the pair have two children, Sophie, 9, and Paolo, 7. “I have a brain and a uterus,” she has said. “I use both. Most working mothers develop two personalities. The trick is to keep one from draining the life out of the other.”

Her character, and an early diagnosis of her condition, suggest that Birmingham’s first lady will be back behind her desk sooner rather than later.

SYMPTOMS OFTEN FOUND BY CHANCE

An aneurysm is the local swelling of an artery — like a blow-out on an inner tube — that can develop if the artery is diseased or weakened, especially when the blood pressure is high. The artery most commonly affected is the aorta (the main artery of the chest and the abdomen), but small congenital aneurysms (those present at birth) can occur in otherwise healthy arteries supplying the brain. Rupture is the most serious risk of an aneurysm. Many have no symptoms and are only found by chance in routine examinations.