MS, Myself And I

It began the night of the hurricane. That seems like a silly thing to say, being from San Diego, California, a place that is famous for its sunshine. Her name was Hillary, the storm of course, and everyone in the southern half of the state was preparing for the worst. It was the last week of summer vacation. I was on day two of staying at my best friend's house, trying my best not to feel like an imposition. I had originally planned on only staying for one night, but the rain was coming down hard, so we thought it would be beneficial if we made the sleepover a multi-day affair.

The morning of the second day, we looked outside her bedroom window and saw that the rain had started to turn into a drizzle. Looking for any excuse to reintroduce ourselves into the outside world, we hopped into her Toyota CHR and journeyed to the local Joann Fabrics to buy craft supplies. We were planning to make matching friendship blankets, so that we had a piece of each other to take with us to college. Her car stereo was blasting “I Think He Knows” by Taylor Swift while our laughs overpowered the sound of the raindrops hitting her windshield; we never worried for a second that the wind was going to blow us away. Who knew that the hurricane would be calm before the storm?

That night, we sat on the floor of her living room with a true crime documentary on and got to work on our blankets. I felt so incandescently happy, that nothing would have ruined that moment of pure serenity, but then I got up from her living room floor and tried to walk to the kitchen, where I was suddenly greeted again by the coldness of the hardwood.

My legs had given out and the right side of my face had gone completely numb. I looked up to find her standing above me, her mouth had forced out a laugh but her eyes revealed her concern. “Bro, I literally just had a stroke,” I told her while I laughed it off. She asked if I was okay. I said that I was. We went on with our night, joking every now and again about how I collapsed onto the floor out of nowhere. Only what I didn’t tell my friend was that the tingling in my face continued for the remainder of our sleepover; it was more inconvenient than it was distressing. Young people don’t have strokes, I told myself, especially not healthy ones like me. If only I could just fall asleep, I would feel better in the morning.

When I woke the next day, the rain had completely gone, but the numbness in my face did not. Instead it started to spread — to my teeth, to my tongue and throughout my right eye. It didn’t happen all at once; just every ten or so minutes and lasted for only a couple of seconds. Still, no alarm bells went off inside my head. I have always called myself a realist, though all of my beliefs tend to be shielded by optimism. Besides, I couldn’t waste my time worrying about why my body had suddenly decided to shut down, because I already had plans to have a picnic with two of my friends, and that seemed much more important at the time.

“Hey guys, I'm literally having a stroke right now,” I shouted over to my friends sitting on the grass, turning the heads of several other people at the park as I ran past. Even though I have always been one for the dramatics, they saw through my positive disposition right away. But like always, I turned my ailments into a form of entertainment, watering down the situation to make it more palatable for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in the park. Soon they stopped asking if I was alright, because the idea that I was having a medical emergency turned into one big inside joke. I am strong willed, I didn’t want to be physically weak, so I offered to drive everyone to the boba shop afterwards. I guess my energetic demeanor tricked them into thinking this was a perfectly reasonable idea, because instead of fighting for my car keys they fought for shotgun.

Maybe it was the company I was keeping that stopped me from breaking, because as soon as I dropped my friends back off at their respective cars, I broke down along with my body. Through my tears, I managed to get Siri to call my mom. She convinced me to drive myself to urgent care, something that I was hesitant to do at first. I was worried that the doctors wouldn’t understand, that they would write me off as unimportant. I had gone to the doctor months prior for chronic headaches, but I was told that I was simply just stressed. My mom told me that she was already on her way to meet me, though she insisted that I was just having continuous episodes of severe migraines, like the descriptions of ones that she found on Google that could cause stroke-like sensations. I sat in my car in rush hour traffic, finally coming to terms with the fact that this may have been bigger than I initially thought.

As I was driving, I could feel my muscles start to give out. My arms felt heavy, I had to fight to keep them on the steering wheel. My legs still felt weak, like there was a weight on top of my head pushing down on the rest of my body. My brain was cloudy, and I was viewing the world through tunnel vision. I had a headache, but I always had a headache, so I had written this off as the norm. Of course, there was the buzzing sensation on the right side of my face, something that I had cleverly decided to call “fizzy face.”

The entire urgent care visit was a blur. I remember limping into the doctor's office with my mom, where they asked me a few questions and then told us to drive to the closest emergency room to get an MRI. I dropped my car off at my house and my mom and I set off to the ER, where I would then spend the next four-and-a-half hours getting poked, prodded, scanned and asked the same questions over and over again. Somehow I wasn’t scared. Maybe it was the fact that I viewed the hospital visit as some sort of twisted adventure, or that I distracted myself by trading poorly timed jokes with my mom. The only time that I cried was when they stuck an IV into my vein. I have always had a crippling fear of needles, and so I shrieked like a newborn baby when the nurse presented me with the small butterfly needle. I stopped crying once they shot me up with intravenous fluids, because for the first moment in over 24 hours I felt slightly better.

As I waited to be summoned for my MRI, I made my mom take photos of me laying in the hospital bed, because I had spent way too long picking out my outfit earlier that day and couldn’t let it go to waste. After two hours of waiting, one of the nurses came for me. She forced me to change out of my long white skirt and purple lace tank top and into a hospital gown, while she waited outside with a wheelchair to take me to the MRI room. I couldn’t help but be excited when I saw that I got to travel through the hospital in a wheelchair, even if it was just down the hall. Every door was being opened for me and all of the nurses did everything they could to ensure that I was comfortable. It didn’t matter that I knew the reality of the situation, that the only reason they were wheeling me around was because they were afraid that I would fall, just like I had the night before. I still couldn’t help but feel special.

Inside the MRI machine was the most comfortable I had been the whole night. It was the only place where I didn’t have to repeat my symptoms over and over again. While the fluids they were shooting into my veins made me feel better, they had very quickly caused me to have a panic attack over the fact that I could feel the liquids travel throughout my body. I had wanted to be anywhere else but confined to my hospital bed.

Most people are afraid of these machines, the doctor warned me that I may feel claustrophobic and they gave me an emergency ball to squeeze if I needed to be taken out. Instead of fear, it was peace that I felt. I was in the machine for what felt like five minutes, but I was told it was closer to 20. I would’ve been happy to be in there for longer, to lay in that tube and continue to make different songs out of the loud beeping sounds that played on repeat. Little did I know that would be the first MRI out of many to come in the next few months.

“The MRI results came back,” the doctor said as he reappeared behind my closed curtain.“It appears that she has MS.” His attention was focused solely on my mother, as if she was the one getting earth-shattering news. My mom gasped, which is not the sound that you want to hear right after the doctor gives you a diagnosis. “Oh my god, are you sure?” she said in response. He was.

“What’s MS?” I asked him, without even looking up from the game of ‘Blockudoku’ that I was playing on my phone. “Multiple Sclerosis,” he stated, in a tone that was more matter of fact than sympathetic. He didn’t care to explain what that entailed, but took the liberty of giving me time to Google it myself. When he came back into the room he asked if I had any questions. I only had one. “Could someone get the needle out of my arm?” He seemed amused at the idea that I cared more about that than I did about the life-altering news he had just presented to me. The truth of the matter was that at that moment, I didn’t care that much at alll. I have always had trouble looking at the bigger picture.

Six months later and the news is still taking its time to process. That flare up lasted for a month and it was the worst pain I have felt in my life. Since then, I have visited with five different neurologists, done three more MRI’s, gone to at least fifteen doctors visits, been on three different medications and spent one full night in the hospital. I still feel special in the hospital whenever the doctors cater to my needs, though I know that I am sick and their job is to make sure I am well. My world is different now, even if daily life is relatively the same. Everytime I walk up a flight of stairs I now picture my legs giving out on me, reminding me that one day my legs might not work.

On August 22, 2023, I was seeking shelter from the storm outside. Nothing could have prepared me for the one my life was to become.

Anna Bacal PetersonMay 1, 2024