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Comment by anongraddebt | Hacker News Reader

Medical 'anomalies', while sad and terrible in some cases, can also be fascinating.

I was seven in the summer of '94 and woke up one day with a completely immobile left leg. My sister came into the bedroom to relay a message from mom that if I didn't stop playing games and get ready for school, then I'd be in trouble. However, I simply couldn't move my left leg.

The rest of the week I spent at home. Whenever I needed to walk somewhere, I'd just hop on my right leg, and drag my left leg along with me.

That week I saw a number of doctors and specialists. Had the battery of tests and diagnostics that are de rigeur for anything where the medical community has no clue what is going on.

Within roughly seven days from the onset of this temporary paralysis, my leg began functioning again and did so quite quickly.

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> Medical 'anomalies', while sad and terrible in some cases, can also be fascinating

I developed some kind of lump near the top of one of my butt cheeks. It was quite a bit denser than the surrounding tissue and it pointed up in a way that it could have been used as a hook to hang a hat on, if for some reason I was naked and needed to carry an extra hat around.

My doctor didn't know what it was, and sent me to have a biopsy. The biopsy showed that it was not cancerous.

It was way too big for my doctor to consider removing, and he sent me to a surgeon to see if she could remove it in her office. She said it was too big for that, and it would need to be done in a hospital. She also had no idea what it was.

Next stop was a dermatologist to see if he had any ideas what it was and wht to do about it (short of surgery in the hospital). He too had no idea what it was. He checked with some colleagues at the University of Washington, describing it to them. They had no idea either, and wanted me to come over to let them look at it, and also show it to the medical students as an example of the strange ass (no pun intended) things that the human body sometimes does that they will encounter as doctors and have no idea what the heck is going on.

Since it wasn't cancerous, and, aside from dashing any hopes I might have had of quitting programming to become a nude butt model, didn't cause any problems I declined and just ignored it.

A few years later, it started shrinking, and a few months later was gone.

One of the doctors told me that this kind of thing--a patient with some weird thing that the doctor does not recognize--is a lot more common than most people realize.

> it could have been used as a hook to hang a hat on, if for some reason I was naked and needed to carry an extra hat around.

It would be more practical to put the hat on your head, or on top of your first hat, if you were already wearing one.

Any mention or checking for it to be a pilonidal cyst?

I guess a biopsy would have shown that.

Sounds vaguely similar to something I had. My left index finger swelled up to about three times its normal size between the lower two knuckles, and was extremely painful to the touch (going through your A-levels whilst on 60mg codeine four times a day is an interesting experience!). No trauma, it just happened for no discernible reason. Various doctors had no idea what it was, and it was still like that some months later, so I ended up having exploratory surgery on it. Turns out it was just a fluid-filled sac of some sort - nothing particularly unusual, and not really any sort of growth, it was just there and shouldn't have been. It has never reoccurred.

Side note: general anesthetics are _weird_. I have memories from during the operation of me looking on that feel 100% real, but they _can't_ be (the room had no walls for a start, and I'm looking at myself in the third person).

I've read things that indicate they actively sweep a lot of weird stuff under the rug. I read of a case of a young boy diagnosed with cancer who spontaneously got all better for no apparent reason. Rather than investigate it, they acted like "must have been misdiagnosed."

When I began getting better when that's not supposed to be possible, my specialist scheduled me fewer appointments because "he had other patients that actually needed him." He expressed zero curiosity about how I was improving.

With shitty treatment like that and getting well on my own, when I moved, I didn't bother to get a new doctor. Internet strangers like to frame that as me being a nutter who refuses to see a doctor rather than doctors being jerks to me and me generally having no reason to see one.

With respect, your doctor’s response seems entirely reasonable. Spontaneous remissions, as this sort of thing are called, are known to happen, but the tools to understand why and how basically don’t exist, or at best are the purview of serious biomedical laboratories; certainly, your doctor couldn’t have mounted a serious investigation with the resources in his office. Meanwhile, the sick always outnumber medical practitioners, and there’s an essentially unlimited number of people in worse condition than yours who he could help; of course he would allocate his limited time to where it would do the most good.

Of course his response was entirely reasonable.

It also has the net effect of:

A. Making me look crazy in the eyes of the world. Gee thanks.

B. Ensuring that our current mental models for various conditions are reinforced rather than questioned in a manner that furthers knowledge about how to actually get well.

Also, I have a genetic disorder. Spontaneous remission doesn't really apply in my case.

Instead, I've spent more than 18 years actively improving my health -- while reasonable people call me crazy, treat me like absolute shit, insist I'm making it up out of a sick need for attention and tell me "extraordinary claims call for extraordinary proof." which is a polite way of saying "STFU. You aren't even allowed to talk about your experiences on the internet without first having irrefutable evidence." It's a de facto social gag order. Good luck proving anything when it's essentially Verboten to even discuss it.

My comment speaks to an entire system and entire world view that actively attacks and dismisses anyone whose personal first-hand experience fails to line up with the medical "party line" so to speak.

We have been calling people "crazy" for questioning current popular medical views for a long time, a practice that effectively cost Ignaz Semmelweis his life -- even though he was a physician with studies to support his cockamamie theory that "mortality rates go down if physicians wash their hands before seeing patients."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Germ theory was later accepted and history has proven him right. Too bad, so sad for him. It doesn't bring him back from the dead.

Your experience may be 100% true and it would still not hold a lot of value for other people to hear about it. Either what you say is true and the odds of it happening are so small nobody can count on it happening to them, or what you are saying is not true and they still cannot count on it happening to them.

It is great that you survived and got the miracle cure that no doubt many people wish for, but if that story isn't one that helps or can inform other people why do they need to hear and acknowledge you? Especially given that the fact that it is medically a miracle makes it impossible to prove means that anyone else can only take it on faith. For the one miracle that happened to you, there are millions of people on the internet making huge claims that are almost definitely wrong. This isn't an environment conducive to good faith.

Then there is the frankly fairly problematic amount of anger that you express this with. It's perfectly understandable given the rest of the context that you put forth, but it makes the whole story even less palatable than it already was.

Your position that the fact that your doctor prioritised people who were actively dying means that you look crazy to everyone else is one that I can't follow, I'm afraid.

I had a very similar thing happen to me in the late 80’s when I was 5. I remember getting out of bed and falling to the ground as I couldn’t feel my legs. I lost function of both legs and couldn’t walk, my parents brought me into doctors and specialist and they had no answers. Less than a week later I regained feeling and function of both my legs like nothing ever happened. I don’t recall having a fever.

I actually forgot that happened to me until your story just now. Crazy.

I read long ago that a large percentage of people experience temporary paralysis with no traceable cause. Of course I don't remember where I read it.

The writer Mary Shelley's arm suddenly became paralyzed when she was a teenager. After several months the paralysis went away.

Check my comment below about myositis, it's most likely what you had!

I get why you would get this during an infection, but why a week or two after an infection?

Same thing happened to me around that age as well except it was only for a few days...

It's highly likely that you had myositis. It usually happens as a response to an underlying infection. The body's immune response is such that it destroys muscle tissue, typically the calves, sometimes the heart.

My 6 years old son had it earlier this year and we were lucky enough that they detected a flu infection (he had no symptoms at all!) as a consequence of standard hospital tests, after being without answers for 12 hours. With that clue the doctors then were able to infer myositis from further blood tests. I never imagined you could have flu without symptoms!

He was back walking and running a week later, as soon as the muscles regenerated.

No, from the description myositis is highly unlikely. He claims his leg was paralyzed completely, not just the calve. Also rapid onset, no phase of "weakness", equally rapid recovery of function is inconsistent with significant muscle destruction. OP didn't report pain, or changes in perception and sensitivity, but I suspect the latter might have taken place.

I'd pick something neurological. Diagnostics involve a lot of poking with needles and electric stimulation, much like you would debug a circuit.

Does the muscle work when stimulated directly? Does it do something it shouldn't while not stimulated (spasmic activity). Do the nerves leading to the affected muscle conduct direct stimulation? Are relevant reflexes working?

Today you'd probably also use an MRI do rule out lesions in the brain and spinal chord. And still, after all of that you might not find anything really "wrong", which often is a good sign.

One case I witnessed had virtually no motor function behind the hips, and no control over bladder release and completely recovered within one or two weeks without significant intervention.

Unfortunately the owner didn't want to pay for an MRI, but the dog, which had a long history of coagulation problems anyway, probably experienced some kind of bleeding somewhere in the spine. Such "vascular" causes typically happen and unhappen that quickly.

One acronym is VITAMIN-D: Vascular, Inflammation, Traumatic, Anomaly, Metabolic, Infection, Neoplastic and Degenerative.

My son went through something similar with what looked like an infection that was slow and then progressed rapidly.

His legs and one hand had swollen and to keep his spirits up I brought in my NES classic that he promptly played even with just one hand. He also couldn't walk due to the swelling.

Doctors could not figure it out, as quickly it was decided it wasn't an infection, but tests gave no indication of anything wrong in any way. They took a lot of blood and did a lot of testing sometimes because they assumed that there had to be something, but everything testing looked normal.

The doctors were really concerned when it moved ever closer (extremely rapidly, you could easily chart changes in 5min intervals) to his head and torso and the fact that it mysteriously "jumped" limb to limb.

There were weird clues that weren't useful clues like how it would start on each leg in the same place, same with arms, and looked the same to start like a bug bite... but didn't look like a bug bite later. During the days he was in the hospital we turned in all our clothes, his bed sheets / blankets and had our house searched for any kind of bedbug, or any kind of bug. We moved rooms and they searched those blankets sheets / the room for anything, nothing found.

They were ready to load him on a helicopter to head to the university... where they told us "we still don't know what to do, but if there are complications we can handle those better at the university". Not encouraging, but I did like their honestly.

Then.....it just stopped and faded away as quickly as it started.

The assumption is that it was an unusual allergic reaction that wasn't well understood.

The "command" the brain fires goes through a tiny cable we call "nerves" so it doesn't strike me as particularly strange if some sort of obstruction renders you unable to move the leg, our debugging capabilities are lacking in many areas so actually resolving those issues is a different matter.

We can do a lot of "debugging". For example you can check if the muscles work on their own, which nerves are conducting and how fast...

It is known that flu-like viruses can cause temporary weakness/paralysis in kids. Some pediatricians know (though I didn't know it had a name: myositis) though I have the impression it can also be a temporary "polio-like" effect

Interesting, thanks for sharing. The plot of Yorgos Lanthimos's strange Greek tragedy "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" starts with a similar premise, and I had no idea it could happen in real life.

Don’t leave us hanging!

Did you/your parents/the doctors ever figure out what was going on? Or did you just chalk it up to a fluke, hoping it would never return?

My 5 y/o was unable to walk for a day or two last year. Diagnosed with this:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5429052/

No one ever figured it out. Obviously, I hope it never returns or if it does that only lasts a week;)

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