Help a Mother of Three in Medical Crisis

Hi, I’m Kennedy, a 29-year-old wife, a mother of three beautiful girls, and a business owner. My health has recently taken a major decline. After multiple ER visits and emergency house calls, we finally got to the road of answers. On May 27th, I had an MRI with and without contrast where I was found to be diagnosed with Transverse sinus stenosis (severe narrowing in both venous pathways to the brain). I am waiting for insurance to approve the surgery to place stents in the pathways to help expand blood flow. On May 29th, it was confirmed through a lumbar puncture that I had IIH. This is idiopathic intracranial hypertension. This is a condition where high fluid pressure builds up in the brain/skull for no known reason. This can cause things such as blurred vision, and in some cases like mine, loss of vision in my right eye that is only getting worse. This also leaves me with chronic head pain.

As if the medical issues stop there, I have been admitted to Tacoma and have been here for going on a week now with no sign of discharge. I am still having episodes (though less) of loss of consciousness, in which most cases I can’t respond or remember what happened. They’re still looking into the cause. When this happens, I will mimic stroke-like symptoms and my right eye will droop, if not close, for some time.

On June 9th at 3 am, I woke up unable to move my right leg at all, and it was painful to the touch. The neurologist came by and ordered my 3rd MRI that will also include the neck, which we haven’t done before. This is to check for any sign of worsening progression along with lesions, stroke symptoms, and signs of MS.

UPDATE: Ultrasound ruled out any blood clots to the leg. However MRI showed signs of built of fluid related to IIH. I have a follow up with a team of doctors that include neurologist to get a better understanding of how to manage my IIH and figure out what else is causing the symptoms of the weakening to my right side of my body

. I will also be seeing an ophthalmologist that will look behind the eyes and study more into the eye diseases and look into the vision loss of my right eye along with any pressure built-up behind the optical nerves.

during my MRI, we also decided to do a spinal MRI and in this we did find a lesion. At the moment with everything else going on the lesion is not the main concern as they don’t believe it is large enough to be causing as many issues as I am dealing with. I will be following up with a spinal neurologist for more answers there. Every three months I will be doing lab draws to check my blood work and every six months for the course of the next few years, we will be checking on the mass to ensure there’s no growth. Though all of this is scary I’m looking at the brighter side of things and not as the fact that we are closer to going home and we are finding answers to get to a place of healing, and the new normal. I’m forever grateful for the team of doctors and nurses that listen to me when nobody else did. Without them we wouldn’t have found the lesion and now we are able to closely monitor another health problem that we are looking into. The good news is that if anything we caught and it’s earliest stages.

With being a business owner, my income is based on what I make in a day from my lovely clients. This is the longest I have ever been out of work, and we are unsure of when discharge from the hospital will happen at the moment. Once I am discharged, I unfortunately will not be able to get back to regular day-to-day life right away, and I will have a long list of appointments with different specialists to get things going to find the right treatments, diagnosis, pain management, etc. My amazing husband hasn’t left my side. As much as his work has been so understanding, he is also missing out on his financial income by being here with me. We still have life, kids, and bills to pay, along with the long list of medical bills we will be drowning in.

This is my last resort for help. But I am reaching out to my community in this time to please help if you can. I am so appreciative to anyone who has reached out during this tough time with words of encouragement and support alone. If you can’t donate, please, please share.