Apart from your occasional headache, common cold, or seasonal allergies, I have always been a healthy person, one with much energy and vitality. It was uncommon for me to be sick or for me to be in bed for days. If I was unwell, I could not stay in bed for more than an hour or so without getting up and taking care of the picking up, cleaning, and laundry on my own. There was never a time, before January 2015, that I could nap for hours during the day or feel so fatigued that I could not get up from bed or even feel tired from working for several hours. I was the opposite; I could work, clean, or do anything from the minute I woke up in the morning until the minute my head hit the pillow without stopping. I'm not quite sure of the month or the day, but all of that turned around one day. Although it had been changing over time, it finally got to the point that I could not get up.
It hadn't been long after the wreck that I began to feel a stabbing pain in my temples that lasted no more than a few seconds. Along with the dizziness came a stiff neck and a headache. There were times while I was cooking that I would experience a stabbing pain on either one of my temples. Other days I felt my brain on fire and would have severe headaches that kept me in bed all day along with high fever. My husband and I are Christians and believe in a higher power. For those months, without insurance, I asked him to give me a blessing which I know with all of my heart helped me during the summer of 2015. Soon it was back to school, and I was to begin my student teaching. I was in my last year of my four-year college education, and I was ready to be finished, ready to move on to new horizons and begin a new journey that included having the perfect job and enjoying my family.
August rolled along, and in the second week of school, I started my student teaching at the local Middle School teaching eighth grade. I gradually worked into instructing the students in the classroom. First, I watched as she guided the students, helped her grade essays and other assignments. Soon I was helping students with their work, and earlier than expected, I created lesson plans and started to teach. In the evenings, after work and cooking, I experienced lightheadedness- what I then called dizziness- but after several Doctor visits learned what it was. As I stood in front of the classroom and taught the class early one morning with my advisor observing me, the whole room spun around me for several seconds without falling over or even leaning over. I went on teaching my lesson. The saying: "those who never complain are never pitied" rang true. I did not complain, and I was not pitied. I finished my internship and obtained my Bachelor's in English and Secondary Education.
Right after graduation, I substituted again. I was still experiencing dizziness accompanied by a stiff neck, tingling, and headaches. It came like clockwork. Every Sunday I would wake up tired as if I had not gotten enough sleep. The dizziness went from occurring now and then to every Sunday. It happened every Sunday in the month of December and January. Until one Sunday my limbs felt like weights and were stiff that I could not move or even get up from the bed. Several Sundays I woke on my back unable to get my body off the bed until after 30 minutes of lying awake in bed. I carried my limbs that way from Sunday until Tuesday unable to lift my arms properly and taking forever to get from one place to the other.
After I had finished school, I began to get worse. Not only was I dizzy half the time during the day, but I was also experiencing tingling throughout my body, neck pain, fatigue, and a stabbing pain in my temples. Although it was not constant, the pain was often and debilitating. On the first Sunday of 2015, in trying to wake up from bed to go to church, I couldn't. I laid in bed unable to move a muscle and unable to open my eyes. I felt myself trying to get up but couldn't.
After that time, the next time it happened, was the next Sunday, and every Sunday after that and it would drag into the next two days experiencing tingling all over my body and was hardly unable to move. Instead of staying home I worked at the schools trying to substitute and carried on as usual. It became a recurring event.
Every Sunday from then on I was unable to get up from bed; this began to create a numbing sensation on the left side of my body, sometimes the arm and sometimes the leg. Then my muscles became stiff until I managed to move my body. Tired, dizzy, tingling, numb and sleeping most of the time, my life became harder than it had ever been before and doing daily mundane tasks became almost impossible without being worn out.
