{"id":12807,"date":"2019-07-31T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-31T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/1millionbestdownloads.com\/condition-cancer-karissa-ostheimer-brain-cancer-misdiagnosed\/"},"modified":"2019-07-31T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-07-31T00:00:00","slug":"condition-cancer-karissa-ostheimer-brain-cancer-misdiagnosed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1millionbestdownloads.com\/condition-cancer-karissa-ostheimer-brain-cancer-misdiagnosed\/","title":{"rendered":"For 6 Years, Doctors Kept Telling Me I Had PMS—but It Turned Out to Be Brain Cancer"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article is part of <\/em>Health's<\/strong> new series, Misdiagnosed, featuring stories from real women who have had their medical symptoms dismissed or wrongly diagnosed.<\/em><\/p>\n

Growing up, I had the stereotypical image of what a seizure was. A person has to collapse, convulse, and practically lose all consciousness, right? Wrong.<\/p>\n

I started experiencing odd sensations in my mid-teens. For a few minutes, I wouldn’t be able to speak, and a feeling of inexplicable terror would wash over me. I couldn't read or write during these brief episodes. My family and friends told me that I simply looked like I was spacing out.<\/p>\n

I only experienced these episodes around the time of my period. When I told my primary-care physician, and later, my on-campus doctor in college, I was told I had PMS and was prescribed birth control pills. These did nothing to alleviate my issue. Yet I blindly accepted this diagnosis.<\/p>\n

By my senior year of college, when I was studying psychology at the University of Maine, Farmington, the odd sensations began gripping me at all times of the month. My friends that witnessed me having an episode said I looked like I was seeing a ghost. Still, other doctors I went to dismissed it as premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a severe form of PMS<\/a>. They also said I may have a panic disorder. I was told to stick with the birth control pills and to visit a psychiatrist for antidepressants, which I did.<\/p>\n

During my last years in school, I didn’t want to go out out anywhere because I was afraid I would have an episode in public. People would be like, “Wow, what the heck is wrong with you?” It was embarrassing to have to say, “Oh, I just have bad PMS.”<\/p>\n

At that point, I had a feeling that something more was wrong. None of my friends were experiencing what I was, but when I asked my doctors why I was the only one, they would reply, “Don’t worry, it’s just PMS” or “It’s just a panic attack.”<\/p>\n

But when I was visiting my mother during spring break of my senior year, she witnessed me have a particularly severe episode. I had a cup of coffee in my hand, and out of nowhere, I just dropped it and froze. My mother took me to the emergency room, but the ER doctor asked me just two questions—if I had taken any illegal substances or drank alcohol that day. I said no, yet the only tests he ordered measured drug and alcohol levels.<\/p>\n

Although I was covered by my mother's health insurance at the time, I was billed almost $1,000 for this pointless visit because I was sent home without a diagnosis.<\/p>\n

A few months after graduating college, the sensations were coming over me so often that the first thing I thought of when I woke up each morning was how many I might have that day.<\/p>\n

I moved to Texas after graduating, and one morning when I was driving to a job interview for a sales position, that dreaded feeling crept up on me, and as a result, I crashed my car. (Thankfully, I only needed a few stitches and no one else was harmed.) That’s what it took for my primary-care doctor to finally suggest that I see a neurologist—six years after I first complained about my symptoms.<\/p>\n

The neurologist had me undergo an electroencephalogram (EEG) test, which records electrical activity in the brain. The results showed I was having an average of 20 partial-complex seizures<\/a> each day. Twenty.<\/em> I was diagnosed with catamenial epilepsy, which means the hormonal fluctuations that occur during my period exacerbate my seizures. I was relieved to finally know what was wrong with me, that a had a subtype of a not uncommon neurological disorder. But unfortunately, that relief didn't last for long. None of the of anti-seizure medications that I was put on worked.<\/p>\n