As mentioned in my previous post, Getting Married, sometimes my legs would become paralyzed. One time, a few months after we got married, my legs became paralyzed. Except a few hours later, they were still paralyzed. After two days of my legs being paralyzed, my feet started to swell from lack of circulation. We went to the emergency department, where the attending physician did a series of tests. John and I stayed overnight at the hospital. The next morning (day 3 or 4 of legs being paralyzed), I could move my legs a little. I still couldn’t put any weight on them, but I could move them side to side a little bit.
The doctor then tested for what he called Hoover’s sign. Apparently, this (along with negative tests for everything else) was enough to confirm a diagnosis of Functional Neurological Disorder (FND). FND affects how the brain communicates with the body. From what the attending physician told me, FND meant that my brain didn’t know how to handle emotions, and it manifested in various physical ways for different people. For me, that meant paralyzed legs, and occasionally a weak body in general.
They put me on a waitlist for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). While I was waiting, though, they wanted to test for narcolepsy, just to make sure it wasn’t that. So I scheduled a sleep study at the facility.
In October 2021, I was waiting on my sleep study and on CBT. My legs were paralyzed one day, and I couldn’t see how I could accomplish all that I had dreamed or all that God had for me with my depression and my paralyzed legs. I had grabbed a gun, thought about doing stuff with it, and ended up in a mental health hospital for five days (details in Getting Married post). After that hospitalization, I was placed on some medication for depression, although I was also having hallucinations (no one knew about that yet).
My meds helped some. My counselor and I had done everything we could with my repressed memories. We tried piecing things together as things popped up, and came to the conclusion that I was raped around the age of seven, though I don’t remember certain chunks of it. After a while of meeting with my counselor, I felt like I had the ability to let my sadness be without becoming utterly overwhelmed and enveloped by it. This is when my counselor and I stopped meeting, and were on a “call me when you need me” basis. By the time we went to a “call me when you need me” basis, it was the end of 2022. At this point, I had accepted not getting to see a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist from that waitlist, and the problem of my legs becoming paralyzed had seemed to resolve by spring of 2022. In July of 2022, I got a job as a home health nurse.
This job was fulfilling, but also difficult to do with depression (as any job would be). I was still nervous about my legs randomly becoming paralyzed, especially since I hadn’t really had any treatment for FND, just the diagnosis. However, my legs didn’t give out on me for over a year. During this first year of work as a nurse, I struggled heavily with depression and hallucinations, trying not to let them affect my work. I believe I never let on that I had any mental health issues to any of my co-workers or the family members of my patient(s). However, I was always exhausted when it was time to come home, and sometimes I was scared and paranoid as well.
In August of 2022, I found out I was pregnant. I’m sure pregnancy had some contribution to the overwhelming amount of emotions during this first year or so of work. I called my counselor to meet a few times during pregnancy, but by the third trimester, I couldn’t take the hallucinations and the shame anymore. I told my counselor, then I requested a meeting with a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and told her about the hallucinations and the depression and shame I was dealing with. She helped me find the right meds (and the right amount of meds) to take to help the depression and hallucinations without making me too tired and/or zombie-like. This took some time, but it was worth the effort.
After George was born, my hormones took some time to level out, but eventually they did. And with the medication I was taking, I could tell a big difference in my mood compared to before I had a baby. I was happier, less scared. But I still felt the sadness linger sometimes, and hallucinations would occasionally still pop up. Medications are helpful, but they can’t fix everything.
Around the beginning of 2024, I had some issues pop up again with my legs. I went to my PCP to see if she could help me find somebody that did CBT, but she wanted to run some more tests to be sure it was FND. So we ran some tests, but they all came back negative, so we agreed that I had FND. However, this hadn’t helped me get treatment for it.
In March of 2024, I finally had made an appointment with a Trauma Therapist to help me work through my trauma. I mean, this therapist would probably teach me the same coping mechanisms as a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist would. And she was available. And she wouldn’t focus just on my legs working or not working. We could work on the things and emotions causing the issues with my legs. I’m not sure if a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist would focus just on my legs, or the emotions behind it. But I figured that this Trauma Therapist could help, at least with processing the rape.
By March of 2024, my job went from night shift for a couple months, to day shift, to part time per my request. By March 2024, I was working two days a week (12 hour shifts) with the same patient I had worked for since the beginning. I loved this family, and I felt fulfilled at my job. This helped the process of therapy.
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