So this is really random, considering how this is something that happened to me about eight years ago when I was 15, but bear with me, because it’s pretty weird and freaky.
So one morning I was running down the basement steps in my stocking feet and I slipped and slid down the rest of the way (about fifteen hardwood stairs with no carpeting on them) on my back. I was fine when I got to the bottom and I got back up the stairs with the help of my freaked out dad, who had rushed out of the bathroom in his underpants when he heard the fall.
He told me to stand in the hall while he went down to get me the bottle of water I’d been attempting to get before I slipped. As soon as he started down the stairs, I began to get one of those headrush things that happens if you stand up too quickly, where you sort of see white spots and your vision darkens for a few seconds. But somehow I knew that it wasn’t going to be any ordinary headrush, and I was right. Instead of going dark for a few moments and then clearing up, my vision went completely black and stayed completely black. But I didn’t pass out.
My dad came back up the stairs and I told him that something was wrong, that I couldn’t see, so he took me into the living room and that’s when I lost about 70% of my motor control. I went weak and if he wasn’t holding me under my arms I probably would have collapsed.
I remember telling him that I still couldn’t see and that I couldn’t move my arms too well, and I remember attempting to lift my arms, only to have them flop back down to my sides like jello after I’d managed to lift them each about five inches or so. Basically it felt like I had ten pound weights attached to them. My speech wasn’t slurred but I remember talking very slowly, almost mumbling, sort of like the way a person talks when they talk in their sleep.
By this time my dad was shaking me and yelling my name, which I still remember with horror, because I could hear the fear in his voice.
Slowly my vision came back and I regained the use of my limbs. By that time my dad had sat me down in one of the living room chairs. It was only a temporary respite, however, because within seconds my vision went black again and my body slumped again and my dad had lifted me out of the chair and was again shaking me and yelling my name. I heard my mom in the background calling 911.
Right after my mom got off the phone with 911, my vision returned again, as did the use of my limbs, and thankfully this time they stayed for good. I did not have another episode but naturally I was terrified for the rest of the day. Although I was conscious for the majority of it, I must have lost consciousness for a few seconds, because my dad says that at one point he was slapping my face, which I do not remember at all. Also apparently my sister had shone a light in my eyes to gauge my pupils, but I do not recall that either (probably because I was blind).
When the EMTs arrived they kept asking me if I’d bumped my head on my way down the steps, but I was POSITIVE that I did not hit my head at all. They put me in a neck brace to be on the safe side and even put me on a back board on the stretcher. At the hospital they asked the same thing. But I absolutely did not hit my head at any point on my slide down the stairs. They ran all sorts of tests, including a CT scan of my brain, but the doctors were rather baffled by what happened to me.
They admitted that their diagnosis, that I had hit either my butt or my spinal column hard enough on the way down or on the landing so as to send a sort of “shock” up to my brain, was largely guess-work on their part.
So what do you guys think happened to me? How can something cause temporary blindness and loss of motor function but allow the victim to remain conscious for the most part?