In November 2005,
a vibrant, independent, driven twenty-year-old woman began to experience
flu-like symptoms. The inability to keep anything in her body was overwhelming,
but she had experienced the flu before, so she thought it would subside over
time. After two weeks, the agonizing pain of being void of food swept through
her body. Sixteen days after the first onset of symptoms, she lost hearing out
of her left ear. Two days later, she lost sight out of her left eye. The same
day, she began having difficulty forming coherent sentences and thinking
clearly. One day after her vision had failed, she was unable to feel anything
from the waist down resulting in dragging her limp, near lifeless body across
the floor of her third story apartment. She tried desperately to relieve the symptoms
by pulling herself into a hot bath, but the inability to distinguish hot from
cold made her terrifying fear worse. Her last memory of her ordeal was looking
down at her legs to see blisters from the heat of the bath water she could not
feel.
December 16, 2005,
she was taken to the hospital via ambulance. Upon arrival to the hospital, an
overdose, stroke, and seizure were questioned. With numerous MRIs, CT scans,
and five lumbar punctures, the man who she would soon come to know as "Papa
Bear," her neurologist, Dr. Wulff, realized the unthinkable. The evening
of December 16, 2005, she was alert, but the symptoms still wreaked havoc on
her body. She fell asleep that evening questioning why this was happening to
her and wishing for an answer of some kind. The morning of December 17, 2005,
Dr. Wulff walked into her hospital room. With her parents, brother, and best
friend in the room, he looked at her and said, "From this day forward,
your life is going to change. You may not understand it now, but one day you
will know the true reason behind the struggles and adversities you face.
Desireé, you have Multiple Sclerosis.
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