“No disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine -- not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs."
Lee Tolstoy
Every day is an ongoing battle with different problems to overcome. An individual’s ailment will be different from the next; mental, physical and so on. Her battle was supposed to disappear, to be hidden from the world but as luck would have it, the world knew within moments. Strangers would stop and ask how she was and she would respond the same each time – “I’m ok. Still alive”. Not many found that as humorous as she did. Humor was all she had. Without it she would fall deep underground into a world of sadness.
What is her illness you may be asking yourself right now. Well it is hard to explain. How do you possibly tell someone that you are ill but your are not sure what is wrong? There is something wrong, the doctors, some, and her closest friends know something is amiss. Others gossip about ‘sympathy’ and ‘attention seeking’. Most doctors mutter the word neurological, perhaps cerebral without offering a reason to help understand. All she knows is that a stroke like episode happened and has turned her world upside down.
Body numbness, loss of motor control, tingling, tiredness, stress, the list is endless. The suggested diagnoses are not much help either: cerebral vascular accident, multiple sclerosis, dyspepsia, presentation confusion and so on.
With no sign of a correct diagnosis all she can do is pray she lives to see another day.
