It started as just pain. Mild at first, mostly in my arms and shoulders, like someone had yanked them out of their sockets. Over time, it got worse. Not constant, just... random, brutal spikes. One minute I’m fine, the next I move slightly wrong and I’m yelping like a dog, unable to lift my arms, turn my head, or function at all.
I’d go to doctors, and try to explain. "Look, I know I seem okay now, but yesterday I literally couldn’t move etc etc." Time after time they would just respond with some variant of "Patient is stressed, stress is inducing pain, patient should stress less." or "patient is overworked, should do less work, etc".
This went on for over a year. I kept having these episodes, days at a time where I was barely functional. The pain, the immobility, completely real to me, but apparently all in my mind according to my doctors. "Take painkillers/antidepressants/rest etc etc." As a result eventually, I began to wonder if maybe I had just gone insane. Maybe this was all in my head and I was just imagining being in pain.
Then things got worse. I suddenly had to pee all the time. My hands started losing dexterity. I began bumping into things, losing my balance, subtly at first, but unmistakably. It was no longer just pain, my whole body was going off the rails.
After I woke up one day, completely unable to move, I was rushed to the hospital. Same story: they told me it was stress, maybe anxiety. I snapped. I told them if they discharged me without finding out what was going on, and I was later to find out that something had in fact been wrong, I’d sue everyone I had interacted with that day. I don’t even remember exactly what I said, but I must’ve hit the right nerve, because they finally agreed to do an MRI, not to help me, but to shut me up.
The scan finished. I never saw the general staff again. Instead, the next person who walked in was one of my country’s top neurosurgeons. He asked, very calmly, if I’d please come to his office for an urgent (and free) consult, because the imaging contained some pretty serious findings that we needed to act upon immediately.
Finding out I had not in fact being going insane...I burst into tears as the news was delivered. For so long i'd just been left to think I was going mad and here I was finding out that there were in fact very real reasons for everything I was experiencing.