Abstract

Three years ago, my body began to slowly, incrementally, go haywire. Sometimes, I would wake up at night and my right arm would be alarmingly numb, taking several minutes to regain feeling. My right hand would ache for hours after I had been working on my laptop. I experienced numbness in the fingers of my right hand after pressing them against a hard surface. Tingling radiated down the back of my legs and into my calves, which I referred to as "zings" or "fireworks."I was chronically constipated and had reoccurring hemorrhoids and anal fissures that produced blood in my stool. I saw dark specks in my eyes that an optometrist called "floaters." The glands in my neck were chronically swollen, and I was prone to...