Hospital Stay

A few weeks ago I wrote a post. Unfortunately, it got deleted after restarting my computer.

It's been approximately three months since my last blog post, and for that I apologize. Quite a bit has happened in that time that I'll share. The first being that I was put on a new medication, Acetazolamide. Initially it helped and that got me excited. My new neurologist told me that if my seizures increased, that I could add a bit more to my dosage, so that is what I did. Honestly, I'm not sure what the medication is doing now. I'm not having seizures everyday, so that is a positive thing. Something else is I moved into a new apartment with my best friend. Our other lease ended, so we moved. Our last place wasn't somewhere we wanted to stay, anyway.

Two or three years ago, there was an incident where I was over at my friends house for the night. I woke up the next morning with extremely bad double vision, but that wasn't a huge surprise for me. It happened sometimes. However, after throwing up a lot, I called my dad, telling him I would sleep it off for a couple hours and that he could get me from my friends house then. What I didn't know was that my dad couldn't understand a word I was saying. My speech was slurred, and he continued to press me asking if I was on drugs or drinking. He came over and took me to the hospital, but practically had to carry me to the car; I couldn't walk. I had tests done at the ER and they concluded I was extremely dehydrated and gave me three pints of fluids. That was it.

September 15th 2018. The night before, I had dyed my hair and everything was fine. Little did I know that things could change in the blink of an eye. The morning of the 15th, I woke up around 8 AM to take my medications. I was fine. Two hours later, I woke up seeing double, and it was extreme. I wanted to sleep it off, but I had to use the bathroom. My best friend who is also my roommate, asked me how I was and I said I was seeing double. She said sorry and that it wasn't good. When I got up to go use the bathroom, I fell off my bed and crashed into her dresser which is about six feet away. She got off her bed and said something along the lines of, "Woah Sara! What are you doing?" My other roommate heard the crash from her room and yelled asking if things were okay. I said yeah. I still had to use the bathroom but gave up on walking, so crawling was the solution. When I got to the toilet, I barely landed okay. After, I wanted to wash my hands which required standing up. I barely succeeded. Thinking I would be better on my bed, I kept telling my roommate what I wanted. She didn't seem to understand what was going on, though she had seen my double vision before. That frustrated me, but now that I think about it, I probably had slurred speech, like before. After getting in bed again, I tried to sleep it off. That wasn't going to happen, though. Immediately I gestured for the trash can, and well, it wasn't pretty. Every time I tried to lay back down on my pillow, I sat up again. Eventually, I knew this whole thing was familiar. I had my friend call my mom for me on my phone, and though my eyes were closed, I heard my mom's voice when she came in. Unfortunately, I live on the top floor with no elevator. Despite my objections, I was helped down the stairs, and into the car. At first, my mom was going to take me to Insta Care, but she told me later that I practically yelled, "NO! ER!" That is what we did. I was helped into a wheelchair out of the car by some nurses, and eventually was placed in a bed, where all sorts of tests were done on me. I couldn't keep my eyes open because of the extreme double vision, and I continued to throw up. I wasn't able to perform even the simplest of tests that the doctors tried getting me to do, such as hitting my hands back and forth. I would simply stare at my hands. Though everything happening was hazy to me, I remember an MRI being ordered. They were discussing how I had a VNS and that it needed to be turned off so I could get it done. Though I was terrified because I had never had it turned off before, a neurologist came in and shut it off for the procedure. It was turned back on after. Later, I heard the doctors and my mom talking about strokes and tumors. Again, everything was fuzzy, but my stomach was in knots, and I asked them if I had tumors or had had a stroke. Or if I was going to have a stroke. They told me no, because the MRI didn't show anything. I only had stroke-like symptoms. To my relief, I was admitted to the hospital for a day and had so many tests done that I had never had done before. That is saying something! I'm a lab rat. Do you want to know what came out of all of it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. There were no answers. All of the tests came back normal. The closest thing to an answer was from a lady from neurology who said she thinks it could be "complex migraines", but it was more of a side-comment. She recommended talking to my neurologist about it.

I was at my parents house recovering for days. I wasn't in the hospital for my birthday, but I was sure weak as all out. It was quite an early birthday present by going to the hospital! Yay! Last Friday, though I wasn't scheduled for an appointment with my neurologist until late October due to no availability, this was important to her, and she squeezed me in. We talked about a lot, one of them being complex migraines. She told me they mimic strokes and that she is positive that is what happened to me. Although I am happy to know what happened, it depresses me as well.

This is a long post, I know, but I have to say this one last thing, perhaps to vent: Having seizures is hard enough. It's beyond hard. But when someone looks at you like you're a bomb about to explode, after having a seizure in front of them and after explaining it, let's just say it damages your soul. You guys know I'm normally strong about all of this, and that I tend to let weird looks from people go by, but when you're trying to form a good friendship with a person and they do that to you? You lose all trust.