First, you need to understand that when all this started I was married with 2 teenaged daughters. I was not in a good marriage so much of what I experienced was amplified by the fact that I had little or no support.

I was working a full time job, caring for children and a home and getting more tired by the minute. My arms started to ache, my head felt as if it were ready to burst at any given moment. I was becoming more and more irritable. I had such a feeling of exhaustion that I wanted to lie down somewhere, anywhere, and just go to sleep and never wake up.

Then the real symptoms started. The ones that were so crazy that I knew something was going wrong. I started getting tingling up and down my arms. My hands and fingers started to burn. The itching became so bad that I would sit for hours and just rub and scratch. I went to my GP's office and found that he was on vacation so his partner took over my care. He examined me and decided that I had "bursitis". He put me on medication and sent me home. I took the medication for a few days but my symptoms increased.

I returned to the GP and he then decided that I was having a problem with a disc in my neck or back so he signed me up for physical therapy. By this time the pain was much worse and I was starting to loose control of the left side of my body. My hand and arm was starting to have shooting pains in them and I was dropping almost everything I picked up with them.

I started physical therapy and it was horrible for me. For some odd reason they decided what I needed was to have my neck and back stretched. I guess that they were trying to force this disc back into place. They put me on machines for an hour 3 times every week. Then they sent me home with a traction device that I was to hook up to a doorway and do all the stretching on the days that I was not in therapy with them. And the symptoms increased.

By now, the only relief I was getting was heat. For some reason my arm and hand would feel better with a heating pad on it. At the same time that I was discovering that heat was helping, I was losing feeling in my arm and hand. I kept turning up the heat so I could feel it. But since I was not feeling much, I ended up burning myself pretty bad. I had no idea that I was losing my hot/cold sensations so I just kept cranking it up :-)

After almost 2 weeks of therapy I left the office one day after a treatment and got into my car. I felt a sharp pain run up the side of my neck right to the top of my head. It felt as though I had been struck by lightening. Then there was another and another. They kept coming and I starting screaming. By this time it felt as though my finger was in an electrical outlet and I couldn't remove it. Some man in the parking lot came over and started yelling at me to try to get me to calm down. All I could get out was that my therapist was in the building. He ran into the building and came back with my therapist. They called 911 and I was taken to the hospital. By the time I arrived there I was feeling fine. It had all left as quickly as it had come.

My husband came and took me to my GP once again. Only this time my regular doctor was back from vacation and he sent me right over for a MRI. After taking this test I went home to wait the results. I did not have to wait long. My doctor called within the hour and told me that I had an appointment with a neurosurgeon in 30 minutes and I needed to get there immediately. He said that he had found the problem with the MRI. I needed immediate attention. Talk about being scared.