The Diagnosis

Part 5 of My Story - blog draft, October 14, 2026

This is Part 5 of my story. If you're just joining: Part 1 was the girl at the YMCA pool. Part 2 was the crash. Part 3 was two Ironman finish lines. Part 4 was the race I didn't finish, and the ten years of symptoms I explained away one at a time.

At the end of Part 4, a doctor watched me walk down a hallway in sandals and suggested different shoes.

She did one more thing before I left. She referred me to a physiatrist, a doctor who specializes in physical medicine and rehabilitation. Looking back, it was the best thing she did for me.

Then I waited. It was the middle of COVID, and appointments weren't easy to come by. It took several months to get in.

I walked into that appointment with a theory. I had been telling myself for years that the tripping was nerve damage from childbirth. So I expected him to tell me I had some kind of pelvic nerve damage, and that I had a lot of physical therapy ahead of me. I was ready for that. I was good at hard work.

He examined me, and the room changed. He was very concerned. He asked me if I had brought anyone with me to the appointment.

I hadn't.

He told me that whatever was going on with me was upper motor neuron damage. I have been a nurse for a long time, and I didn't understand what that meant for me. In plain terms, it meant the problem wasn't in the nerves of my leg. It was higher up, in my brain or my spinal cord.

I asked him if he thought I had a brain tumor.

He said he had about 20 things on the laundry list of what this could be, and a brain tumor was not one of them. He wanted an MRI of my brain and my spine before going any further.

Then he said something I have thought about many, many times since:

"In hindsight, you'll be able to piece a lot of things together."

He was right.

I had the MRI at 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon. I was in the scanner for 40 minutes.

At 8 the next morning, I was at work. My phone started ringing. It was the doctor. I was in the middle of caring for a patient, and I couldn't stop to answer it. I had to call him back. Until I did, I was a nervous wreck. As a nurse, I knew what a call that fast usually means.

The answer was in my neck.

I had degenerative disc disease in my cervical spine, and it had been pressing on my spinal cord. Not my back. My neck. The spinal cord runs through it, carrying every message from your brain to the rest of your body. Mine had been squeezed for a long time, and it was damaged.

Before he ever called me, he had already talked to a neurosurgeon. Within an hour of learning my diagnosis, the neurosurgeon's office called to schedule my appointment. My doctor told me this was the surgeon he would have his own family see. I found out later he's considered one of the best neurosurgeons in New England.

You don't need a medical background to see what's wrong in that picture. I've had people with no medical training look at it and go quiet.

Four neurosurgeons reviewed my MRI before they ever met me. All four assumed I was already in a wheelchair. Then I walked into their offices.

I was one hard bump to the head away from being a quadriplegic.

Remember the fall on the trail with my dogs, when I caught my foot on a rock and came down hard on my knee? I told you in Part 4 that I didn't know that day how much could have gone wrong. This is what could have gone wrong. If I had hit my head instead of my knee, I might not have gotten up.

And it wasn't just one fall. In the months before surgery, I was still playing tennis five or six days a week. I was still trying to run. I was still trying to bike. Any one bad trip on any one of those days could have done it. I thought I was weak, so I kept working harder. Every time I pushed through, I was gambling with something I didn't know I had on the table.

That's the part of never giving up nobody puts on a poster.

Here's what hindsight did.

Every excuse on my list from Part 4 turned out to be the same thing.

The tripping wasn't childbirth. The numb hands at Mont Tremblant probably weren't just the shifters. The clown-shoe feeling on the treadmill wasn't the shoes. The falls weren't a lack of strength training. My handwriting wasn't arthritis or laziness. The bathroom trips, the morning stiffness, the walk strangers asked me about. My chiropractor was right about the foot drop.

All of it was my spinal cord, trying to tell me something for ten years.

As a nurse, I have read a lot of charts. Reading my own was different. Once I saw it all in one place, it was obvious. It just never came to me in one place.

People have asked me if running marathons did this to me. It didn't. Being active did not cause this. Did the crash in Part 2 speed it up? Possibly. I'll never know for sure, and I've made a kind of peace with not knowing.

In October 2021, I had major spine surgery. The surgeon fused three levels of my neck, from C4 to C7.

My neurosurgeon told me that only about 10% of fusions done in this country are three levels. The rest are one or two. That made it even more important that I take very good care of it while it healed.

So I did the hardest thing anyone could have asked me to do. Nothing.

I wasn't allowed to do anything for six months. No tennis. No running. No biking. For someone who had been on a court five or six days a week, it was its own kind of hard. But I understood exactly what I was protecting. I kept quiet, and I let it heal.

The surgery stopped the damage from getting worse. It couldn't undo what had already been done. The injury to my spinal cord is permanent. My right leg still doesn't get every message my brain sends it, and I still walk differently than I used to.

I want you to understand that part. Not so you'll feel sorry for me. So you'll understand what it took to get back up.

When I was allowed to move again, I went back out into the world. I walked differently, and people noticed. Some of them had things to say about it.