Where Did Jenna Go? Update!
I am a firm believer that taking a break to take care of yourself is not a bad thing and totally needed. A little incident happened on my birthday (Happy Belated Birthday to me!) which forced me to take a step back on everything, but I am finally back this week. Since I do have some medical issues and something like this might happen in the future; I think it’s important to just address it.
Basically I was out on my birthday and I lost consciousness, but there’s a ton more that goes into it. For the past few years I have been having these mystery falls where my legs will just give out and I’ll have moments where I will lose vision and/or hearing. They only last a few seconds and have never exceeded a minute, but I’ve never lost consciousness with them. Sometimes I will feel it come on and sometimes it just happens out of the blue, but it’s never been a huge deal. I’ll just drop to the ground, take a second to recover, and then I’m perfectly fine again.
Obviously though, people don’t struggle with that and I reached out to my doctor about it over a year ago now. My doctor was as puzzled as I was and then started the hunt for answers. Tons of doctors, specialists, medications, and tests ranging from 2 minutes of ease to 45 mins of torture and still nothing. They first thought I was having seizures and now they are looking at conditions that are common with other diagnosed conditions I currently have. I’m planned to see a new specialist in April of 2022, but who knows what will come from that.
Let’s head back to my birthday though. I was out, having a good time and then all the sudden I started to not feel so hot and like I was going to have one of my falls. I was planning on handling it the same way I had in the past. I’d drop for a few seconds, act like I’m tying my shoes to avoid the potential embarrassment, and then stand up and return to my birthday. So I was standing there with my friend and they later tell me one minute we were fine and he was telling me that Bob Ross was back on (Yes, Bob Ross was on for some reason) and then I was just falling, trust fall style with only a few stools and the concrete to catch me.
I was out for a short period of time and I remember waking up super disoriented. I had never lost consciousness before and now I’m confused, dizzy, and embarrassed in public, on my birthday. I get some help to get off the floor and I struggle for a good 5 minutes with just basic functions. Walking is a big no, I can barely string together a sentence, and I feel so awful, yet I have nothing to compare it to. Needless to say an ambulance gets called and by the time they show up I am back to normal. They do all the basic checks and they say I look fine. I really don’t want to go to the ER on my birthday since the year prior I was in the hospital on my birthday for some mysterious brain thing, so I declined going. I can acknowledge now that wasn’t the best decision, but I just wanted a good birthday (those don’t come easily for me).
The ambulance drives away, I wrap my night up, and slowly the adrenaline wears off and my head is starting to pound. Unsurprisingly, I have a concussion. I make it through Sunday and see my doctor on Monday where we make a plan to hopefully figure out what happened. I get confirmation that I do have a pretty bad concussion and I should take it super easy for a while and we start on the new list of tests. They are thinking it’s either seizure territory or potentially cardiac event territory, but regardless something is obviously weird and needs to be fixed.
I wish I had a great ending, but I don't. Here I am, returning almost a month after the incident and I’m still struggling and recovering from it. The tests I’ve taken so far have come back normal and no doctor has been able to point me in any clear direction. I am still having my falls (the normal version of course), but nothing as crazy as what happened on my birthday. All I can do is move forward with an open mind and a positive spirit and hope for the best. Who knows what's going on, I’m just glad to finally get back to normal life.
I have an amazing set up planned for this next month and I can’t wait to show you guys and get back into education and most importantly helping other small business owners! I think that anyone can be a small business owner regardless of what issues you might be struggling with. It can be super hard some days to raise a toddler while struggling with chronic health conditions at the same time that you’re running a small business, but it’s worth it at the end of the day.
Cover photo shot by: Dorothy Louise Photography