Memory is such a funny thing, no?

Another lost memory: when I was 5 or 6, I came down with a rare neurological disorder called Guillian-Barre Syndrome, which basically paralyzed me from the neck down for several weeks. The paralysis starts from the legs and moves up the rest of your body. My parents noticed something was wrong when I kept falling while I was walking. They attributed it to clumsiness at first. Then one night I was walking up the stairs at my grandparents’ house and my legs buckled beneath me and I fell down half a flight. They realized it was serious when I couldn’t stand back up.

I was admitted to Children’s Hospital in Oakland and stayed for about 3 weeks. My mom tells me that for several months afterward, I had to go through physical therapy to rebuild my muscles and learn how to walk again, but I don’t remember any of that. I don’t remember much about that time at all, except that my mom had to feed me because I couldn’t move my arms, someone brought me smurf stickers (the 3-D kind made with rubber with a piece of foam inside that makes it puffy) – I really really loved those stickers, being rolled into an operating room while lying on my stomach and feeling like they poured ice all over my back before losing consciousness, and being fascinated when during a follow-up doctor’s visit, he gently tapped my knee with some rubber hammer and my leg popped up on its own.

Memory is such a funny thing, no? How random is it that the clearest memory I have relating to the time I was paralyzed, hospitalized and operated on is puffy smurf stickers? From Deb, Interrupted: Rants, raves and ramblings