Persevere: My True Story of Surviving Medical Mystery

By Quiana Watson

Quiana was born a regular, healthy baby girl. She was a normal toddler, normal school-age child. It was in her early teenage years when circumstances began to change. Quiana was all of a sudden thrust into a strange world that would become her life. At the tender age of thirteen, she was diagnosed with a rare, sometimes fatal brain ailment. After this diagnosis, it was as if Quiana couldn't catch a break. One after another, the disorders, diagnosis, distress, and the chaos that came along poured

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781644628584

Book preview

Chapter 1

Green Means Go!

These CDs can fly!

Look!

My Sega is sending me messages!

I have to find the color pink!

These are just a few of the strange, very weird things I came home from school saying one afternoon. It was May of 1995. It was the end of my eighth grade year. I was about to be finished with middle school.

My mom, dad, or sister didn’t know what was going on. What was wrong with me? All of these strange comments I was making along with all of the strange behavior.

I was throwing all of my CDs down the stairs after breaking them, trying to get the pink inside the cases. I was running from my room to my parents, telling them about the secret messages my Sega was sending to me. The Sega told me I needed to go to a particular place before it was too late. My family thought maybe another student had slipped me some type of drug sometime during the school day. My best friend’s mom was an emergency room nurse at Children’s Hospital at the time. They lived down the street. My parents called her to see what she thought about the situation. She walked down to our house. I was rambling on, talking nonsense, acting very strange. She didn’t know exactly what was wrong, so she advised my parents to take me to the emergency room at Children’s Hospital. My parents took her advice and decided it would be best to head to the hospital.

By this time, evening was setting in, it was dark outside. As my parents were getting prepared to take me to the hospital, I went upstairs to my room and grabbed one of my trophies from the recently ended track season. I ran out the garage door, out of the garage and down the street, holding my trophy high in the air. My parents quickly realized what I was doing and my dad ran after me, catching me and walking me back to our house. As my mom and dad started conversing, I ran off again, trophy still in hand. This time my parents jumped in the car and drove down the street to where I had run to. My mom jumped out the car, grabbed me, and put me in the back seat of the car. She got back in the passenger seat. My dad was driving. It quickly became apparent I could not sit in the back seat alone. I was rolling down the windows, moving around, trying to open the doors. My dad abruptly stopped the car, and my mom immediately got out of the front seat and got into the back seat with me. She had to restrain me throughout the entire ride to the hospital. I was still trying to roll down the windows, reaching for the green exit signs, strewn down the highway.

We finally pulled up to the emergency room entrance. My dad got out of the car and brought a wheelchair over. He opened the back door and put me in the wheelchair. By this time, a few nurses had come out to assist. I immediately started grabbing them. Their scrubs were green and for some reason I wanted that color. The nurses wheeled me into the hospital and took me to a room right away. My parents nervously followed. They couldn’t quite grasp my strange behavior and didn’t know what to make of it. When we got to the room, they instructed my parents I needed to put on a gown. After I was changed, a doctor came in. He explained the first thing he wanted to do was a spinal tap. He said this would give them a better picture of what was going on with me. My parents agreed.

The doctor got everything prepped and ready to go for the spinal tap. A few nurses bent me over the rail of the bed. My