The Internet Strangers Who Solve Your Unsolvable Medical Problems
CROWDSOURCING A CURE
·Updated:
·

This is a story about somebody whose body started breaking down in increasingly weird ways. And there's nothing she can do to understand it, and nothing she can do to convince people it's real. For the purposes of the story, let's call this woman Hope.



One beautiful winter morning, Hope goes for a walk and starts to notice this weird eye pressure, like her eye is pressing on her skull. She goes to an eye doctor, but the doctor can't find anything wrong with the eye—she says it's totally healthy and normal. This bulging feeling continues for a month. And then one day, it's abruptly gone.

 

Hope thinks it's just a weird, freak occurrence. That is, until one evening when she's home working. Hope is a wedding photographer, and she's setting up a room in her house where she can meet clients. And all of a sudden, she can't see out of her right eye. A quarter of her field of vision is covered up by this weird zigzag, almost like looking through a kaleidoscope. This continues for 10 or 15 minutes. It only goes away when she lies down. She starts Googling this zigzag eye thing and finds out, it has a name: Scintillating Scotoma, a type of migraine. And Hope does have a history of migraines, so she thinks maybe it's connected to that.

But weird things keep happening. Hope's starting to feel really tired all the time. Like, winded-walking-up-the stairs tired. And then the headaches that she used to get, she starts having them all the time. Like this deep pressure behind one eye. A few times she goes to see her doctor, and he gives her headache medicine.

Nothing is helping, and Hope feels like she's going crazy.

Hope is out Christmas decoration shopping with her sister the day she realizes that something is really, really wrong. Hope's walking around, in a good mood, taking selfies with a garland around her neck, and suddenly… she's hit with this sensation. It's like she's standing on a seesaw, and the whole floor is shifting up and down beneath her.

After that, these waves of dizziness start coming every day. And her headaches, which had seemed so bad they couldn't possibly get worse? They get worse. From there, her symptoms just get freakier: she starts to hear a fluttering in her ears, like a butterfly beating its wings. The palm of her hand starts twitching uncontrollably. And, if she touches a part of her cheek, her nose goes numb. She goes to doctor after doctor. But they keep telling her it's just migraines, or it's just anxiety.

Nothing is helping, and Hope feels like she's going crazy. She doesn't know what else to try. And so, this week on Reply All, Hope turns to a bunch of strangers on the Internet: a site called CrowdMed.

 

For more Reply All stories on Digg, click here


Subscribe to Reply All on iTunes or with your favorite podcaster, visit our website or just listen on Soundcloud.


You can also subscribe to Reply All's RSS here.

<p>Reply All is a podcast about the Internet hosted by PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman. You can listen by using your favorite podcatcher or by going <a href="http://replyall.diamonds" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>

Want more stories like this?

Every day we send an email with the top stories from Digg.

Subscribe