No one believes that their life will end, until one day they simply warn you. For me, it all started one day in October, when I started to feel the numbness in my right hand, I thought it was going to be temporary and from 1 hour it became a week until it magically disappeared.
We all have daily thoughts, we think we are going to be extraordinary, we think we are destined for greatness, until one day it just happens. This was how the numbness returned. This time it was all over the right side of my body. I learned to live with it and a week later it magically left. Suddenly he came back, but this time on the left side of my body, he left and came back on the right side of my face and then on the left. Those comings and goings led me to take action, my father asked a doctor for advice, but the neurologist who recommended us was in a conference and could not attend us. My mother and 1looked in a directory for a Neurologist and the first one that had a space available we visited them that same day.
The doctor found nothing wrong in consultation; However, I needed an MRI of my head to be able to visualize what I had. We made the appointment, the closest was in 1 week, the doctor recommended us to wait and my mom asked what symptoms we had to watch for, the doctor said: vomit.
A week went by and I was getting worse. All day I was like a drunk, everyone was moving, I couldn't tolerate light, going to the bathroom was tiring me, all the time I was lying down. Finally, the day of the resonance came. They put me in a machine that looked like something out of a space movie, it made some surprising noises, you sit in a “time machine” and for an hour I didn't move. After the MRI that night I started vomiting, I vomited so much that I started vomiting blood and couldn't stop. My body simply asked me to vomit.
We arrived at the emergency room the morning of December 8 and they immediately did a tomography, they said I had 2 strokes. The doctor who had treated me was not on call, so we were recommended to deal with the neurologist on call that morning. There we met Dr. Maria Teresa Reyes, who had been recommended to us but had been to a Congress; possibly if he had been in full consciousness, he would have thought it was a message from fate. At that point I just wanted to be normal.
I was 21 years old, I was in the University, I had never fallen in love, I was just beginning to live, to realize the wonders of existence and I was there, in an emergency bed with two strokes, which in a matter of hours They came back more, because they were not strokes, they were holes in my head. Neither the Neurologist, nor any of the doctors who saw me had seen the same thing, I spent weeks in the hospital without improvement.
I had all eyes closed, I listened to what the people around me spoke, interacted with them, listened to them cry, some of them were going to say goodbye to me; That someone says goodbye to you at 21 is not very hopeful. I wanted to live and people asked me to fight, but I did not know what it was to fight, I saw nothing, there was no dragon to overcome, there was nothing tangible to do. Two months before I had great expectations of life, I thought I was going to achieve great things and from one day to the next my expectations were stolen.
I had 4 lumbar punctures, one of them without anesthesia, because the resident doctor forgot the process. Every 3 days they put me into the resonance machine to take photos of my brain again, in the end they decided to let me go home, because there was nothing they could do for me, other than waiting for the results. As at that time it was already Christmas and New Year was coming, they considered that the best thing was to be in my own house. Those two weeks, I took over my parents' room, I slept with one of them every night, I was dependent for everything, I couldn't eat, I couldn't walk, I couldn't do anything without help, I was a 21-year-old, 60-kilo baby it seemed like he was drunk all the time.
Surely in one part of the world there was a 21-year-old boy who was drunk all the time at the same time as me and he - at that point - had a better future than me.
I spent Christmas in bed. On New Years I threw up all the dinner. My family says it was the worst New Year celebration they can remember. For my part, I began to live, I began to live in my dreams. Every night I had dreams that were so real that during the day my only hope was that the night would come to live. In my dreams I moved normally, I was independent, I was a 21 year old. In my dreams I played soccer at the Azteca Stadium. In my dreams I could run, surf and even the worst of nightmares seemed the best of dreams, because when I opened my eyes in the morning the nightmare began.
On January 6, I returned to the hospital to see the Neurologist. In that consultation, she commented that he had all the patterns to declare that I had Multiple Sclerosis, I did not know that disease, but just knowing that I had it would help me continue. In that consultation, the Doctor also told us that something had gone "weird" in a study and recommended that we make an appointment with an Infectologist. We made an appointment for 8 at night and returned home. On the way back we had to stop at a McDonalds to vomit, that was the nature of my nightmare.
We came to consultation with the Infectologist Patricia Volkow and for 1 hour she dedicated herself to questioning me, as if it were a political trial and not a medical consultation. At one point, she asked: Have you experienced lived dreams? I was surprised. How could she know what was going on in my head? How could she know something that no one else knew, something that nobody had shared? My natural instinct was to protect that and I said: No.
During the clinical review, she put me on a pulse oximeter. I had spent more than 1 hour sitting in her office and when she checked my pulse I was at 120, she asked me if I was nervous and I said no, because I wasn't. She kept checking and my pulse went up and down from time to time from 60 to 110, from 120 to 40 and so on. Only she could interpret what my heart was screaming.
The heart speaks in different ways, but there is a universal language that not all of us are able to recognize and understand, Dr. Volkow did. During the month that I had been sick, I had meditated with an audio for at least an hour every day and I felt how my heart beat faster sometimes. I thought it was because I was fighting and I was glad to know that. What he didn't know is that he was yelling at me and I couldn't hear him, I didn't know how to listen to him.
That January 6, someone heard him. That day the doctor decided to intern me and at dawn they did an MRI of my heart, number 30 at that time. That night, the doctor stated that I had myocarditis, in addition to the brain holes. He asked my parents for permission to start treatment and that morning I started the treatment.
There are people who pay to read the stars and the letters, what they want is to have a clear interpretation of their destiny and their future. And there I was, in a room, with a doctor who had spent her whole life studying and during that hour, that woman got into my head and into my heart. There are people who pay others to match them with their soul mates, that person who goes to their hearts and heads. I was just lucky enough to meet that person at the same day, maybe fate was not such a strange thing to think about.
I was alone in a hospital room, my parents were fatigued, physically and emotionally they decided to go to rest while the nurses took care of me. That night I had no dreams, that night happened like any other night in my life, but just that was the special thing. In the morning I got up and went to the bathroom leaning against the serum holder tripod. He had not been able to walk alone in more than 1 month and that day he had magically done so.
When I came out of the bathroom, I found my mom walking into the room and she couldn't believe what she was seeing. He started crying, when she left the room she met my doctor and according to what they tell me, because I was walking to bed, they ran and hugged each other and cried together saying "IT'S LYME". I do not know if in the history of humanity, two women have been so happy that someone had an incurable and practically unknown disease, like my mother and my doctor.
There began the most difficult path, the path of recovery. Days later they put a catheter that went directly to the heart so that the medicine and my heart, together, helped me to recover. Two weeks later I left the hospital walking, with a hose to my heart, but alive. I felt ironman.
I stopped dreaming vividly, but I started living. I had to learn to do everything, to speak, to walk, to live. A month after leaving the hospital, I decided to tattoo the professional certificates of the two women who saved my life, Maria Teresa and Patricia, until today, that tattoo for me is my reminder of destiny.
I changed my career, I started working at the hospital where Dr. Volkow worked, two years later I received a research award together with her for an HIV investigation. Four years later I graduated with a degree in Psychology. Five years later I ran my first marathon. Six years later I finished a Master in Development. Seven years later I got a Guinness Record for running the fastest marathon dressed as a star. Eight years later I started a company: Dream Job Company and ten years later I am here, writing this and beginning to live, living my dreams while I am awake, listening to my heart and trusting that destiny has wonderful things prepared for me. All I have to do to discover them is to be alive.
So many resonances and medicines for the brain finished my hair, I have scars on the brain, on the heart, on the marrow, on the chest and 15 more tattoos that remind me and protect me every day. I have dreams lived from time to time and that reminds me that I live with a disease all the time and that my body is strong to control it.
Ten years I have lived with an incurable disease, with a Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium within me, my eternal life partner, who from time to time there are days that wins the battle and makes me feel numb, dizzy, incapable, but that reminds me that the most important battle is won every day, one day at a time 365 days a year, the most important battle is with me, which reminds me that sometimes the fight is visible and other days the fight is unlivable, it is against you It is against your demons, it is against something hidden and you only need to listen to yourself and ask for help when you cannot alone.
On rare occasions my illness wins my battle, some days, some hours, some weeks. I have a disease inside me that is waiting for the opportunity to take advantage of me. Recently, meditating, I understood that one day, something will happen to me and that day my body will fight against what has happened to me and my disease will take advantage of my debt and will win the battle. I know that it will kill me someday, but I also know that it is in me to make that day be delayed as much as possible, I also know that the day that happens will be the day that destiny reaches me, because my destiny lives in me.
Victor Solis Garavito
(All pictures have been shared with individual consent. Please de not share without permission).
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