Hey everyone,
It’s been how many years LOL I haven’t been using my blog the way I hope I would but it’s better late than never right? In 2015 I was diagnosed with a Neuromyelitis Optica commonly referred to as NMO. After two flareups, I thought yes I was good, I was eating better, was taking my medicine, things were fairly under control. Just when I got comfortable, I had the worst flareup possible. It started out where my right leg was totally numb to the point where I could not tell hot or cold on it. I would just feel pressure then it started to feel like I was dragging it when I was walking. I didn’t think anything of this because my last flareup had totally different symptoms. I thought I was just tired and overworked because my job at the time was a lot. Little did I know that I was having a flareup.
Something inside me just said girl pack your stuff and go to the emergency room. Now this was in the heights of Covid, so I called them to find out if they were admitting people on the ward because I thought that whatever was going on with me, I definitely had to be admitted, still didn’t think it was a flareup. I got there they examined me and let me tell you something, they said it was a good thing I came in when I did because things were just gonna get worse, I was like how worse could this possibly get and then I remembered that one girl I met another time when I had a flareup, and she had lost her ability to walk totally…her legs were paralyzed.
Was I scared? Oh yes I was but I put on a brave face and I went in. They put me on five days of high-dose steroids and they will keep checking for changes. They did their regular bloodwork and everything every day, on day four they checked me and realized there were no changes so my doctor came to me, and he proposed doing a plasma exchange. I told him I had to think about it, which only meant googling what the hell a plasma exchange was. I spoke to my mom about it and she said “you have to do what you have to do”. I prayed and went in to get the catheter inside my neck vein, they had to use a large vein so that they could pull the blood out with a machine, remove the plasma from my blood and replace it with brand new plasma.
I remember only crying once, but through it all I prayed, I prayed a whole lot. My mom was there for me praying with me, and since then, I am always praying. This helped to strengthen my prayer life, my beliefs in a higher being because it could only be him who got me through this Without having a total break down. People might hear me talk about it and they see me smile and think I’m OK but it took a lot out of me to get through it all. My recovery took eight months and even then when I went back to work, I was still in pain, but I prayed and pushed through it.
I wish I remembered a lot more details to share or I had written this down years ago however, some thing impressed upon me to share that God is alive and he controls everything he controls if/ when we wake up and I just want to say without him I could not have made it through this period of my life. Right now I am in a much better place, my recovery is going so well and I thank God every day I wake up. I can move my legs I thank God, I don’t feel pain I’m thanking God, in everything I give thanks to God because he is the one who got me through. He gave the doctors all that ability to do everything that they did so all thanks be to God. My friends that were there with me throughout this journey I am so grateful to them. The other day one said jokingly “remember when you used to have those episodes on the phone and I would sit there and wait for you to be done?” We laugh about it now, but it was so hard, it was very hard back then. I’ve never cried so much in my life, but I’m still here bent but not broken.
Xoxo Trudy
#NMO #flare #flareup
