Coma

The Day My Childhood Changed ❤️‍🩹

I was in 7th grade when my mom got really sick.

My mama had always been one of the strongest women I knew. And I mean strong. 😂 She worked a man’s job, had arms that looked like they belonged on a grown man, and I had literally seen this woman fight grown men.

In my eyes, my mama was pretty much indestructible.

Then one day I found her lying on the bed with her arms and legs stretched straight out, staring at the ceiling like she was looking into outer space.

She was talking about how she thought getting a toilet wax ring in her mouth had made her sick.

I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

I just knew something was very wrong with my mama.

So I called 911.

We eventually found out she had severe chickenpox that had affected her brain. She ended up spending around four months in the hospital and about half of that time in a coma.

I’ll never forget the first time I went to see her.

She was in isolation because she was contagious, but seventh-grade me wasn’t thinking about any of that. I saw the doors and barged straight through them.

Someone yelled at me because I wasn’t supposed to just run into an isolation room.

Too late. 😂

I ran straight to my mama, wrapped my arms around her, and bawled my eyes out.

I just wanted my mama.

I remember that room being dark and freezing. The white blankets. The beeping machines. The tubes. Her body covered in chickenpox sores.

The woman I thought was indestructible suddenly looked completely helpless.

For months, I went to the hospital after school.

I did my homework beside her bed. I carefully dabbed pink calamine lotion onto her skin because I was scared I would hurt her sores. Sometimes I was nervous to even touch her.

But I still kissed her.

I couldn’t help myself. She was my mama.

I would sit there, do my homework, put lotion on her, cry, and wish more than anything that she would get better.

Looking back now, I realize how young I really was.

I was still supposed to be a kid, but I was already learning how to be a caregiver.

Eventually, my mama woke up.

The tubes were gone.

She survived.

And I remember how emotional it was seeing her awake again.

But there was something I didn’t understand yet.

My mama had no idea who I was.

❤️‍🩹🌱

#healingoutloud #childhoodtrauma #cptsd #traumarecovery #caregiver #MentalHealth

Hi, my name is MarissaNicole. I'm here because I want to tell my story about being diagnosed with Aplastic Anemia at a very young age and then being diagnosed with epilepsy years later .
What Happened Is Part of Me, Not All of Me

What Happened Is Part of Me, Not All of Me

The Story of Marissa Nicole

My name is Marissa but most people know me as Rissa.

If there is one thing I want you to know before you read another word, it's this:

What happened to me is part of my story, but it is not my identity.

People often hear words like brain hemorrhage, coma, aplastic anemia, or epilepsy and immediately feel sorry for me. They see the diagnoses before they see the person. But I don't want pity. I want people to see proof that even after life knocks you down, you can still stand back up.

This isn't just a story about surviving illness.

It's about surviving fear.

It's about surviving the moments when I wondered if my life would ever be normal.

It's about learning that strength isn't pretending nothing happened. Strength is accepting what happened, carrying it with you, and still choosing to live a full life.

I hope that if you're reading this while you're scared, angry, or asking, "Why me?" you'll realize you aren't alone.

Because I asked those same questions.

And I'm still here.

Chapter One

From Fox Lake to Fighting for My Life

My story begins in Fox Lake, Illinois, where I grew up with my mom and dad. For the first seven years of my life, everything felt like a normal childhood. I laughed, played, dreamed, and never imagined that my entire life was about to change.

One night, while I was asleep, I suffered a brain hemorrhage that caused me to have a seizure. My parents had no idea that when they put me to bed, everything would be different by morning.

The situation became so critical that I had to be flown by helicopter to Lutheran General Children's Hospital in Chicago.

Doctors searched for answers and eventually discovered something much bigger than anyone expected.

I was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder called aplastic anemia. My body wasn't producing enough healthy blood cells. My white blood cell count was dangerously low. My platelet count was dangerously low. My body couldn't fight the battle it was facing on its own.

Soon after, I slipped into a coma.

For my family, every day became a waiting game. Every conversation with doctors carried uncertainty. Every moment was filled with hope mixed with fear.

To survive, I needed countless treatments, blood transfusions, and eventually a life-saving bone marrow transplant.

The months that followed were some of the hardest of my life, even though I don't remember every detail.

I spent nearly nine months confined to a hospital bed.

When I finally woke up, surviving wasn't the finish line.

It was the beginning of another fight.

I had to learn how to walk again.

I had to learn how to talk again.

I had to rebuild muscles that had forgotten how to move.

Simple things most people never think about became mountains I had to climb.

Just when it felt like I had overcome one battle, I faced another. I spent more time at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where I became bed bound again and came frighteningly close to losing my life a second time.

Eventually, around the age of nine, I walked out of the hospital.

I was finally cured.

The scars didn't disappear.

The memories didn't disappear.

The fear didn't disappear.

But neither did I.

Looking back now, I don't see a weak little girl.

I see a warrior who refused to quit before she even understood what the word "survivor" meant.

That little girl had no idea what the future would hold.

She couldn't have known she would one day face epilepsy.

She couldn't have known anxiety would become another mountain to climb.

She couldn't have known there would be days she'd question why all of this happened to her.

But she also couldn't have known something even more important.

She was going to make it.

And years later, she'd be telling her story—not so people would feel sorry for her, but so someone else could believe they could survive too.

#YouAreNoAlone

Hi, my name is ShinyJaguar17415. I'm here because my boyfriend was recently put into a medically induced coma and I am terrified and being shut out for information on his condition.

#MightyTogether

People know the story. The coma. The brain injury. The machines. The moment they told my mother I wasn’t coming back.

But what they don’t know — what they can’t know — is what happened to my soul in the aftermath.

Because my real awakening didn’t happen in the hospital bed. It started after. In the silence. In the confusion. In the unrelenting questions that wouldn’t let me rest.

Who am I now?

What happened to the “me” that floated somewhere beyond this world?

And how the hell am I still here?

That’s what cracked me open — not just the trauma, but the mystery. The sense that there was more. Something deeper. Something ancient and invisible, humming just beneath the surface of everything.

I didn’t come back chasing normal. I came back chasing truth.

I started asking questions people don’t usually ask — not out loud, anyway.

What is consciousness?

Where does it live when the brain goes quiet?

If energy can’t die, did part of me cross over and return?

Or… did I die in one version of reality and just wake up in another?

It sounds crazy until you’ve lived through it.

I began to see that everything is energy. Not metaphorically — literally. Thoughts, emotions, bodies, trees, sounds, memories — all vibrating, all connected, all flowing. And I realized we’re not just in the universe… we are the universe, experiencing itself through fragile, flawed human form.

The brain isn’t the source of consciousness. It’s the radio — picking up frequencies from something far greater. What I touched in that coma wasn’t a dream. It was pure awareness. No fear. No time. Just a knowing. A presence. A deep, peaceful current that said, You’re not done yet. Go back.

And so I did.

But I didn’t come back the same.

Now I move through life like someone who’s seen behind the curtain — someone who remembers the stillness beneath the chaos. I can feel the world vibrating. Sometimes it’s beautiful. Sometimes it’s way too loud.

I live with pain. Headaches that pulse like thunder. Anxiety that wraps around my chest like a storm. Sensory overload. Exhaustion. A body that still feels stuck between realms.

But I also live with a kind of knowing. Not a belief — a knowing — that there’s more to all of this. That we are not broken. We are becoming.

Energy doesn’t die. It shifts. Evolves. And sometimes, it wakes up in a hospital bed, gasping for a second chance.

So here I am.

Still learning. Still unraveling. Still following the breadcrumbs left by that otherworldly peace I felt when the lights went out.

I don’t have all the answers. But I know I’m here for a reason.

And if you’re reading this, maybe you are too.

Maybe you’ve felt the weight of this world and still heard a whisper through it.

Maybe your pain is the beginning of your becoming.

Maybe your story — like mine — didn’t end where others thought it would.

We are more than our bodies.

More than our scars.

More than anyone has told us we are.

We are light wrapped in skin.

We are memory wrapped in soul.

We are here. Still.

And that something.

I was diagnosed years ago with BPD anxiety, depression, DID and CPTSD. I’m 79 but it’s like I’ve just come out of a cloud and I’m now dealing with my diagnosis. I’m struggling to keep my head above water and even believing that I have any conditions. But there’s a part of my brain that says you know you do. Wasn’t diagnosed until I stopped drinking and using prescription drugs. I have 37 years of sobriety, but most of them were in what I call an emotional and mental coma. I’m just waking up now and trying to figure out how to live#BorderlinePersonalityDisorder

I’ve been taking antidepressants since February 6th. I take duloxetine twice a day ( one in morning and another in evening).

Nothing much has really changed other than 1 thing.

Just like in the first two weeks of taking antidepressants, I haven’t had an episode of depression for about a month, and my sleeping has overall improved. However, there has been a few times where I did sleep between 1-2 am, but I think maybe it’s because I took the antidepressant late and I’m guessing it takes time for the antidepressants to take in effect; not entirely sure how it works (Sometimes I take the antidepressant at 10:00 pm when I come home from work).

As mentioned above, not much has changed except 1 thing, and that is my food cravings. At first, I didn’t really crave food as much in the first two weeks, but then a week ago, I started eating a large amount of food again. I ended up buying Chick-Fi-La on Uber, and later that same day, I also bought 2 big bags of spicy chips last Saturday on February, then Sunday I ate Churches Chicken, then Monday McDonalds, then Wednesday McDonald’s again. Quite recently, on Monday this week, I bought a lot of food for myself but couldn’t really eat it all because I got uncomfortably full, so I gave it away essentially wasting money for nothing. I’m not sure whether I should count it as a depression episode but I did have a couple times where I almost felt the depression creeping back in after eating a large amount of food. Before, I started taking antidepressants for the first time, I would frequently go into food coma and into depression after eating a large amount of food.

At the same time though, occasionally, my food cravings have calmed down. Sometimes I just don’t feel like eating more, and eating whatever my mother makes is enough to satiate my appetite. So I guess, I could say that my food cravings have improved but not entirely, and surprisingly despite the amount of food I ate last week, I didn’t really gain a lot of pounds. Tomorrow I’m checking my weight again. As of now, I haven’t really gained any weight since last month.

My ADHD symptoms haven’t really improved. I still procrastinate and have a hard time starting tasks. I’m hoping that when I do visit a psychiatrist, I’ll end up getting prescribed medication for ADHD. Here where I live, it’s kind of difficult getting prescribed for ADHD mostly because those type of medications can be used for selling or become addictive which is why I have to wait until I visit a psychiatrist.

So yeah, after a month of taking antidepressants, nothing much has changed. I’m considering on telling my doctor about my eating habits.