“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”—Sharon Begley.

To give you a sense of what I experienced all day long, every day, consider this analogy. Imagine you awaken at the start of the day and you immediately whirl yourself into a sitting position on the bed next to your night table. You quickly don a backpack, which contains a battery. Next, you strap this gizmo over your left shoulder and place your left hand and forearm into it and lock them in place. Then you plug it into the battery and turn it on. What is this gizmo? It’s a deep fryer that quickly reaches 375 degrees, and now you keep your hand and forearm in it for the entire rest of the day, and you do this on repeat every day of the week indefinitely. When I told you my daily symptoms were severe, this is what I mean.

Time had no meaning. It could be 4 PM on a Monday, 9 AM on a Thursday, 1 PM on a Saturday, and I felt the same way, as if time had disappeared: pure, unrelenting discomfort.

At the rate my symptoms were going, I feared that I was going to reach a point where eating was out of the question, and I would be forced to go on parenteral nutrition. And this was without a diagnosis, let alone a treatment.