Okay, I'm Hannah and I am 23. When I was 20, August 31st to be exact, as soon as I had woken up done a few normal tasks and after an hour or so my arms began sending sharp pains from my finger tips to my shoulders. My mom was there and she asked if I would like some ibuprofen to take because she had arm pain sometimes and figured it was nothing. By the time I my mother got the ibuprofen to me with a drink of water, I could no longer move my fingers. Not long after my back went painfully numb, I could no longer feel my chest. I went to the hospital and the 20 minutes of waiting I couldn't stand up and had to have help into a wheel chair.. Long story short 2 hours later, I was paralyzed from the shoulders down and I had this sensation of numbness, tingling, light but stinging and sometimes sharp pain. (Sidenote: the ER doctor thought I was faking it) but after a week they diagnosed me and I was immediately placed on IV steroids and placed in physical therapy. An additional 6 weeks later and I was out of there just barely able to walk, I was completely reliant on home health care and basically anyone who could deal with it that day. (Almost 3 years later and I'm almost independent but not quite yet, still striving)

But here's where I tie in everything to make sense in this thread. The day before I was going to take my GED test, I had just been fired, I used my last dollar to put gas in my car, and I have always had terrible anxiety. I was pretty scared going onto a campus where there were lots of people and it was a school where there was a hostage situation. I was walking from building to building trying to find where I needed to be and I couldn't. As the time for the test came and went I kind of lost it. I had the biggest panic attack of my life. I couldn't drive home for another hour or so. I got home and continued to stress and cry. My doctors could find no cause for my transverse myelitis.
I completely believe that stress played a factor in my spinal cord swelling. Even now when I get stressed I get achy and I have had to go back for 5 day IV steroid treatments 4x. I get weakness randomly. It's kind of like it's still sending shock waves through me. I know they say that it usually happens only once, but I think they mean the swelling itself because this is happening pretty regularly for me but I'm having to only do physical therapy now because steroids are beginning to cause more problems than they solve. But I'm thankful it wasn't worse.