At 5 years old, my daughter Isabel was a beautiful, bubbly girl with no health problems. I took her to the Father-Daughter Dance and she became ill 2 days later. This was the start of what would amount to 3 hospital visits and 5 doctor visits with multiple misdiagnoses. One week after the Father-Daughter Dance, Isabel was admitted for what would turn out to be a misdiagnosed disease. At first, she was having seizures with active vomiting, extreme behavioral changes and her doctors did not know what was going on. They continued to treat her for unrelated illnesses. Even while in the hospital, the doctors there attempted to discharge her, stating that it was only an infection and that she was fine. We told the doctors that it was something neurological and that she was in an altered mental state. They insisted that this was not the case and that we did not know what it was. By the next day, she was in the Pediatric ICU fighting for her life, paralyzed and unable to speak with absent seizures as well as other neurological problems and altered consciousness.
The doctors treating her were concerned and told us she may not make it through the night as her body

At the beginning of January and February of 2016, this supposed “one-time illness” attacked again. For 3 weeks we took her to 15 doctor visits with 9 different doctors and 3 hospital visits to be told nothing was wrong and that we were over-reacting. We continued to fight against these doctors and 3 weeks from the start and almost 2 years to the day of the first attack she had a relapse of ADEM with Optic Neuritis (ON). However this time she was left blind in one eye and for several weeks, continued losing her vision in the other, along with extreme behavioral changes and severe headaches.






By Peter Fontanez