Have you ever experienced strange daily symptoms that you can’t quite explain, so you just try to pass them off as normal? Well, that was exactly what I did as a teenager when my problems started. It started around 2012 when my left arm started randomly spasming one evening.
I’ll never forget the moment I accidentally threw my food all over my little brother because my arm jolted so dramatically. I had no idea why it was happening to me, after all, I was only 17 at the time and didn’t have any answers. It was very confusing as to why my body was suddenly spasming so randomly.
I had never had any health problems before, and my parents even thought I was doing it for attention. We were living in Cyprus at the time, and the health system over there is very different to the U.K., so going to the doctor for a checkup wasn’t even a consideration. My life centered around my studies, so I just tried to keep my head down and focus on school.
Although even that became difficult when the spasms started becoming more frequent, and they started to affect my other arm and both my legs. I remember sitting in class and kicking the person sitting in front of me by accident because a spasm caused my leg to jerk forward. Of course, it wasn’t much of an excuse to say I had no control over my body either.
Around that time, I also started having these bad fainting spells and I would lose sensation in my hands. That wasn’t great whenever I wanted a nice, relaxing bath and was unable to gauge how hot the temperature was when I tested the water. So, a lot of the time, I ended up scalding myself or passing out in the bath after thinking it was perfectly fine.
As the spasms started to escalate, it was harder to ignore them. Everything changed on my eighteenth birthday in February 2013 when my entire right arm became paralyzed. The spasms were one thing, but this was much harder to explain.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
