Am I Awake?

I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. I don't know which was worst. I just remembered being in pain, my feet burning, from what they thought at the time was an podiatry problem . I was about five months pregnant in June 2012 at a family reunion when it all began.

I woke up at 3:00 a.m in the morning frantically because it felt like there were spiders crawling all over my legs. I ran to the bathroom and filled the bathtub with cold water and soaked my legs until I relaxed the feeling away.

Around this period of time is when I was also diagnosed with a rare eye infection that was caused from an old contact. Yes, I know you always hear the rare possibilities of what wearing an old or dirty contact will do, well I was definitely living it. But having lupus, I am more reluctant to infection than others. This infection caused me to go blind for three months. At the time its like I knew it would get better even though the doctors were telling me otherwise. Or maybe it was because I was experiencing so many other pains along with that one, pains worst than that.

During that period of time I slept in intervals of thirty minutes to an hour tops. Most times I would only fall asleep because I'd gotten so tired from being tired from being in pain. I didn't know if I was asleep or awake a lot of times. I didn't know if I was daydreaming, actually dreaming or if life was really moving that slow around me. At the time I wanted to go to sleep, so could possibly never wake up. I was just that sick, that that was kind of a possibility.

After the eye infection seemed to have cleared up, about four months later I had my first black out seizure. I was walking to take out a diaper bag and all of a sudden, my body, against my will, stopped walking. The next thing I remembered after that is hitting the ground facing my neighbors house, then waking up to my mom and the ambulance; my hair covered in leaves and my shirt hanging of my shoulders and me left there looking confused . We soon found out that infection had lead to a viral meningitis in my brain. I began having seizures back to back. My body was literally malfunctioning like a broken hard drive. Despite doctors thinking I'd be left with brain damage, I only walked away with hearing loss in my right ear and vision loss in my right eye also due to the previous infection and dysfunctions in certain organs.

But the doctors I ended up with after meningitis finally put the pieces together from where all the pain and tingles in my feet were coming from. They also discovered this culprit was the very reasons for more of the symptoms we thought were being caused by meningitis. It was transverse myelitis. Inflammation of the spine. It really took me off guard that it all kind of roots back to lupus, it just attacks my spine.

That period of time felt never ending and I actually looked like what i was going through, HELL. But I got bored with thinking it was the end, I got tired of feeling like hell, I knew I had to change my mindset.

#lupus #transversemyelitis #beautiful #inspirational