After my collapse on May 9th, I spent the next week at home waiting for another medical emergency to happen. The emergency room doctor told me I would be a “hard case to diagnose”, because there wasn’t a known trigger for my collapse. Obviously, this made me paranoid because I didn’t know what was causing what he called an “allergic reaction” and I was weary about being far from an emergency room in case something happened.

Sure enough, I was back in the emergency room a week later. This time, I didn’t collapse, but I felt it coming on. I was having trouble breathing, my body was tingling, and doses of nausea and vertigo were prevalent. Again, I was given the same diagnosis, severe allergic reaction. And again, no trigger for the reaction. I was given fluids, antihistamines, watched for a couple hours, and sent home.

This is where things take a turn for the worse. For the next week, I proceeded to get increasingly sick. A couple of days after the second emergency room visit, I thought I came down with the flu, or Covid, or something in addition to the medical mystery I was already trying to solve. What I didn’t know, was that my illnesses were intricately intertwined.