PEOPLE writer and reporter Brianne Tracy was 23 years old when she was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder
That day, I was supposed to be packing for an upcoming assignment in Hawaii to cover a shoot for Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. Instead, I found myself lying on a bed in the emergency room of UCLA’s Medical Center in Santa Monica, California, barely able to walk or talk. It was my first time being a patient at a hospital, and I was shaking as I waited for a doctor to come in to give me some explanation as to why my body seemed to shut down out of the blue.
When things started getting worse, my mom — who still lives in the Bronx — insisted that I go get checked out at a local urgent care. After explaining my symptoms to the doctors there, they boiled it down to an ear infection and anxiety, and they sent me on my way with a prescription for the anti-anxiety medication Clonazepam, or Klonopin. They completely ignored my concerns about the loss of balance I was feeling.
The next morning, I had a catheter inserted into the veins of my neck so that my doctors could begin a procedure called plasmapheresis, or plasma exchange. During plasmapheresis, tubes from a big centrifuge machine are connected to the catheter to filter out unhealthy plasma in the blood in exchange for healthy plasma, or a plasma substitute.
The next eight days on the ventilator were definitely the most difficult, though my memory is a bit fuzzy when I think back on that time — and I’m not sure whether that’s due to the brain’s coping mechanism or because I was sedated with micro-doses of fentanyl to manage the pain.
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