, featuring stories from real women who have had their medical symptoms dismissed or wrongly diagnosed.. That's what I told myself when I noticed a twitch in my right pinky finger. It was slight—like an eye twitch that no one else can see, but you can feel—so I figured it wasn't anything serious.made sense. I was 18; I had just graduated high school and spent the past two weeks celebrating senior weekin Ocean City, Maryland, near my hometown of Baltimore.
After checking me out, my doctor made a diagnosis: physical symptoms of anxiety. I was so confused. I'd never been clinically diagnosed with anxiety before, but I knew what anxiety was—and this wasn't it. I broke down crying in his office because I felt like I was only getting further away from the truth of what was really going on with me.
At the same time, my health continued to deteriorate. My psychiatrist prescribed me Olanzapine, an anti-psychotic, which turned me into a zombie. I lost 30 pounds, my face and body looked thin and sunken, my twitching and spasms had spread to my toes, and walking so difficult I moved like a 90-year-old woman.
In that moment, it was clear something was neurologically wrong with me—this wasn't just anxiety. I had an appointment with a neurologist later that week, but my parents took me to the emergency room. The ER doctors also believed I was suffering from a mental health condition, schizophrenia this time. The staff forced me to sleep with my door open—I was on a type of suicide watch—but my parents had me discharged in the middle of the night because I couldn't sleep.
Dr. Wolf ran a lot of tests—two MRIs, an EEG, various blood tests—and all came back inconclusive. Finally, Dr. Wolf ordered a specialized blood serum test. It came back positive for a condition called anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. At the hospital, I started treatment: high doses of a steroid to help the inflammation, spinal taps to check my progress , and infusions of the drug rituximab, to help my immune system recover.I was in the hospital for just five days, but my entire recovery process was a long ordeal. I was diagnosed in July 2018, and only officially stopped all of my medications, including the antidepressants I was prescribed before my diagnosis, in June of this year. I even took a semester off college.
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