I had to fight for my life — and for the life I wanted

As told to Rivka Streicher

Thirty years ago, my life drastically changed course. I was a 23-year-old wife and mother. My bechor was 15 months, my baby daughter just shy of three months. I was young and should’ve been at the peak of good health.

Aside from when I gave birth, I’d never been hospitalized. When I started feeling odd on that long-ago Shabbos morning, I didn’t imagine it would be the start of a rollicking ride.

But life’s taken me for a spin over the last 30 years. I’ve faced daunting health challenges again and again. My innocence took a beating, as did my trust in the doctors. I had to assert myself, challenge the experts, fight my way through.

Hashem put a lot on my plate, but He also made me more determined than most. To be well. To live.

Too Young

Back to that Shabbos. I awoke with an incessant ringing in my ears. I tried to get out of bed, but a force was dragging me down. I managed to stagger to my feet and get myself and my children down the stairs. I opened my front door, and when my neighbor’s cleaning lady passed the house, I called out to her to get my neighbor.

My neighbor took one look at me and called a doctor. I was in a terrible state, but I was able to communicate with the doctor, and with my husband who’d just gotten back.

“Vertigo,” the doctor pronounced. “Take it very easy, and expect to feel awful.”

I crawled up the stairs and lay in bed, only to be hit by a pain so severe, it was like a truncheon hitting me in the head. I screamed for mercy that wouldn’t come. Later my husband told me that my face was pallid, and my eyes had rolled back. I was vomiting, and couldn’t even turn my head to heave over the side of the bed.

My younger sister, who lived nearby, came over as she did every Shabbos. She was stunned at my state, but she sat next to me, washed me up, and soothed me, and slowly the worst of the attack subsided. When I could handle sitting up, I realized something startling: My entire left side had gone slack.

After Shabbos, my sister, bless her, took both my babies, even though she had a crew of her own little ones, including twins. I was weak and limp and could only just try to hold on to myself. The left side of my body was frozen, and everything was off kilter. I was trying to breathe through the fear, terrified that an attack would strike again.

A friend of my mom’s, whose husband suffered with vertigo for years, came to visit. She looked at me, at the way I was dragging myself around, and said it didn’t make sense. This was too much, too off for vertigo.

She made me summon another doctor. He came around, examined me, and sent me straight to the emergency room.