My Dad's Mystery Illness

It was a Sunday afternoon in early January. We had gotten back from a family trip in Israel the week before. My mom had gotten really sick with flu symptoms right before we came home and had been to the doctor and tested positive for type B flu. My dad had taken Tamiflu so that hopefully he would not get as sick as she did, if he caught it. Our whole family had gotten flu shots this year, which clearly hadn’t worked. Anyway, that Sunday afternoon, I heard a loud voice coming from my parents’ room, it was my dad, yelling out in pain. He had a sharp painful jolt go thru his upper back and could not make it stop. My dad is usually very stoic so it was scary to hear him yell out that way. He laid on the bed and the pain got a little better but not much. Our neighbor who is an internist came over to look at him. My mom wanted to make sure he was not having a heart attack, a blood clot, or any of the other random scary things that can happen to middle-aged men. Our neighbor did not think it was anything life-threatening at that point and suggested we see how he was on Monday morning.

My dad slept okay, and when he woke up on Monday, his back pain was better but his stomach had gone numb and so had his groin and upper thighs. He called my mom at work who said he needed to go right to the urgent care. My mom had to go to work that morning because she had already missed two weeks from the flu and could not miss any more. At the urgent care, the doctor listened to my dad’s description of what had happened and sent him immediately to the ER. He went first to Emory, since we live closest, but when they told him it would be an eight hour wait, he then went to Piedmont Hospital. At Piedmont, they started doing all kinds of tests: an EKG, blood work, and a CT scan that came first. When none of those showed anything wrong, next came an MRI. My dad has never been claustrophobic before but for some reason, this completely freaked him out and he had what he described as his first panic attack ever. They were barely able to complete the MRI. At that point, the numbness he had been experiencing had spread up to his chest. My mom brought me and my brother to see my dad in the hospital and it was scary to see my normally loud, strong, and funny father in a hospital bed hooked up to an IV, but he and my mom tried to make it seem like everything was going to be okay.

After two days of tests and waiting, Piedmont Hospital doctors sent my dad home, unable to figure out what was wrong. He was still numb. My mom was not satisfied with the proposed wait and called a neighbor who was a retired Emory neurologist to see what he thought. He thought my dad needed to go back to the hospital, but this time, to Emory. Frustrated, tired, and worried, back he went. They ran all of the same tests and he had to go get another MRI. This time they gave him some medicine to try and make him less claustrophobic which he said helped a little, but not enough! Once again, the tests all came back negative. Toward the end of a very long day of tests, someone came in and did a flu swab test. Much to everyone’s surprise (since he did not have flu symptoms), he tested positive for Type B flu, the same flu my mom had! The Emory doctors came up with a diagnosis – my dad had something called Transverse Myelitis which according to the Mayo Clinic website is “an inflammation of both sides of one section of the spinal cord. This neurological disorder often damages the insulating material covering nerve cell fibers.” The cause? In my dad’s case, the condition was likely caused by the flu virus. My dad has since regained some of the functionality he lost but still has a lot of numbness. The doctors are hopeful that he will regain some of his sensitivity to pain and temperature in the affected areas but it could take up to a year or more.

My family and I had never heard of this happening to anyone. We have learned a lot about how a virus can affect multiple systems of the body. Now, as you might imagine, my parents are especially concerned about how my dad’s systems would react to getting COVID-19 and we are all social distancing the best we can to keep him safe. The doctor says there is no reason to think that he would be more susceptible to COVID-19 because of what happened with the flu and that his reaction does not necessarily qualify him as vulnerable to COVID-19. However, given all the uncertainties of the virus and the ever-changing medical information available, we’re choosing to remain cautious.