I had been looking forward to October 1st since I had reached out to one of my stage management professors about talking one-on-one on chronic illness and the industry, and they gave me a stage manager to contact who was working in the field and had a chronic illness.

I met on Zoom to speak with them and had a really fruitful and honest discussion about how their chronic conditions affected their work as a stage manager. It was helpful to get some of my questions answered and I felt better prepared moving forward as I began to work on shows again at my school.

October 2nd my inflammation issues developed a new symptom which was swelling of my neck which didn’t help with my breathing and swallowing issues. Once this started happening, I reached out to my medical team to schedule a consult to try and speed up the process of someone getting eyes on the breathing problem.

I was having a lot of issues that week with inflammation on my back and neck causing breathing difficultly which made it feel as if I was breathing through a deep fog no matter how large a breath I took.

As I began doing more in my classes, my stomach would routinely growl at a similar time every day at the end of my second class. It mostly happened on my nonlipid TPN bags, but I had made a mental note of it for myself to monitor.

On October 6th I had been invited by the physical therapy team to “have lunch” with them (I wouldn’t eat obviously, but it was a time to catch up with everyone since I had been discharged from PT in the summer). It was so awesome, and I enjoyed getting to catch up with everyone in the office. I looked forward to seeing everyone again soon!

After my lunch with the physical therapists, I went to a gynecology appointment to get someone to monitor my period irregularities. This had begun happening once I hit malnutrition, and after getting onto TPN. My body takes a long time to adjust to things plus, my TPN has affected my body in so many ways that a lot of parts of my health have been affected. Gynecology said we needed to wait until December when my body has officially had a year on this particular formula, to see if I needed to go on birth control to help with my cycles. I also got my first HPV dose done in the office since I hadn’t gotten them when I was younger.

The nurse who was giving me the shot had told me it had no side effects but that the shot itself would hurt a lot. I had mentally prepared myself for the pain and I didn’t even feel the shot when they had given it to me. The nurse was SHOCKED and had told me that I didn’t even flinch.  I explained to them that I already had multiple lidocaine shots plus 2 surgeries to that arm so the pain from this vaccine was nothing in comparison.

October 7th I was up all night feeling awful and was coughing and had a stuffy nose from what seemed to be out of nowhere…

On October 8th I had felt even worse and developed a low-grade fever. I had googled and found that side effects from the HPV vaccine could give “flu-like” side effects, so I had figured that’s what had occurred.

Since I was feeling so sick, I wasn’t able to go see the ballet with a friend of mine that I had planned for the day.

The following day I continued to have a fever and on October 10th I emailed my professors that I wouldn’t be coming into class. My nurse had come to change my dressing and mentioned that the delay of the fever until the day after the shot was likely a genuine cold or flu of some sort. We figured that the HPV shot weakened my immune system enough that I was able to catch something.

Alongside having a cough, I was still having breathing pain with each inbreath and back and neck inflammation.

I attended school the next day, and continued to have a cough for the next seven weeks. You can imagine my abdomen loved that…

Read what happens next in the story, “Don’t Hold Your Breath!”