Let me start by saying that before I got sick, I went to school for social work before training to be a dental hygienist. I stayed there because I loved my job and my coworkers, and the money was just what I needed to take care of my kids. I was 31 years old, and I was happy.
On September 7, 2018, I noticed that my hands were clammy and that I had really bad anxiety.
I left work early to go and see the doctor because I knew that something was wrong. He recommended that I see a counselor and believed that I was suffering from “mental issues.”
I continued to see various doctors in various
hospitals who prescribed me various anxiety medications that would not work.
Then, one day, it got really bad.
I set out for a hospital 35 minutes from my
house, in Alliance, Ohio. I got confused and couldn’t find it, so I drove
myself home and called my sister, who immediately came to my house because I
was talking erratically, in a way that worried her.
I wasn’t making sense, so she drove me to the
hospital, where I had a seizure. My sister called my mother, who was living in
Cleveland at the time, and told her: “Come home now! Tisha is not talking
right.”
My mother dropped what she was doing, without
even packing any clothes, and she and her husband, Larry, jumped on the
highway. From what my mother tells me, the hospital in Alliance had already
sent me to a hospital in Canton, Ohio.
When my mother arrived, I wasn’t making any
sense, wouldn’t eat, and kept trying to leave the room. A doctor came and asked
whether I had a history of mental health problems.
My mother replied: “No. There is nothing wrong
with her mind. Something is taking over my daughter, I just don’t know what it
is.” At that point, I had another seizure, which put me in a coma.
From this point on, I only know what I’ve been
told, as I was totally unconscious.
A doctor announced that I needed to be put on
life support to survive, and with this news, my whole family’s hearts were
broken. My mother felt helpless, watching me lying in the hospital bed and
knowing that there was nothing that she could do about it.
I had a series of
tests. The doctors told my family 99 things that I didn’t have,
but they couldn’t tell them what I did have.
Then, on September 17, 2018, I was moved to
another hospital, where they diagnosed me with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis,
a rare autoimmune disease that can attack the brain. This is the same disease
featured in the book and Netflix movie Brain on Fire.
While I was at the medical center, in
Cleveland, I had a tracheostomy to help me breathe, and surgeons removed one of
my ovaries in the hope that it would help me get better.
I was there until October 29, 2018, and then I
was moved to a nursing home in Boardman, a suburb of Youngstown, Ohio, which
was closer to my family. My mother says she felt like nothing was being done
right. She was frustrated and scared.
Source: Medical News Today
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