Why could my 14-year-old suddenly not walk?

As told to Faigy Peritzman by Anna King

You never know what’s going to happen from one day to the next. Looking back to the winter of 2013, it’s clear my life has been divided between “before” and “after.”

Our family of seven (five daughters) had just moved to our new apartment on a yishuv outside of Yerushalayim. The morning after Chanukah vacation, my 14-year-old daughter, Ariella, woke up not feeling well. I was running around trying to get everyone out on time despite the back-to-school sluggishness and didn’t pay much attention to Ariella’s complaint. She didn’t seem that sick and I figured maybe she just needed another mental health day before going back to school.

Yet on day two, Ariella still hadn’t come down from her second-floor bedroom, claiming she felt too weak. And on day three I knew we needed a doctor and quickly. I made an appointment with our GP at the yishuv clinic. At this point Ariella literally could not stand up. We carried her to the car, but when we got out at the clinic, she fell to the ground, scraping her ankle very badly and bleeding heavily.

The staff tended to her ankle and then we had our appointment with our doctor. He had no clue what was going on, but decided he’d send her for blood work. There happened to be a visiting orthopedist at the clinic at that time so we consulted with him as well. He also was stymied, but didn’t think this was an orthopedic issue and thought we should head straight to the ER. We thought he was overacting, and decided to come back in the morning for the blood work and then make a decision based on that. But while the blood work showed nothing out of the ordinary, we had reached day five and it was clear something was very wrong.

We traveled to the hospital and were admitted to the ER. Ariella had to sit in a wheelchair; although she was able to shuffle her feet a bit to move a few feet, there was no way she could traverse the hospital corridors. My husband is a Kohein and avoids hospitals whenever possible, so it was me hauling her into the wheelchair — and she is taller than I am.

The ER staff took one look at her and began bombarding her with questions. Had she eaten anything different recently? Had she taken a vaccine recently? At one point they even sent me out of the room to ask her more personal things that perhaps she didn’t feel comfortable admitting with me around. They were afraid she was on drugs and wouldn’t admit it.

Finally, when the battery of tests and questions all showed nothing out of the ordinary, they admitted her to the pediatric ward and basically decided to wait and see what would happen next. What happened next was that things got worse.