In 2021, I had been living in Spain for more than 4 years, where I’d moved to be with my partner. Every summer we would travel to the US to spend time with my family. During the COVID year (2020), we stayed in Spain, but in 2021 we were able to go to the US again. And I was really looking forward to it!

My sister had gotten married a few weeks prior to our trip home, and since some guests – including myself – hadn’t been able to attend, another sister and I had decided to throw a party at my parents’ house to celebrate the wedding. I was supposed to arrive a day or two early to help.

I did the COVID tests before leaving Spain because I was not yet vaccinated…the plan was to get vaccinated in the US, since it coincided with the weeks when people my age could be vaccinated in Spain.

The trip advanced normally until I got to Dallas, where almost all flights were canceled due to lack of staffing for the airlines. I have never seen so many people cry in an airport before. Families going on vacation, a man who had taken out a loan to go to a relative’s funeral… When I spoke with an American Airlines representative, he told me that I was going to have to wait 4 days in Dallas and that they would not pay for the hotel or other expenses. This was the first moment of foreshadowing.

My solution was to buy a different flight through a different airline, stay one night in Dallas, and then I finally arrived home during the last hours of my sister’s wedding celebration. It was disappointing…I had missed her wedding because of COVID and now the party too. Second bad omen…

My jetlag didn’t go away until July 6th. I went to bed at about my “normal” time the night before, on the 5th. By the morning of the 6th, I was feeling fine. I was finally going to get my COVID vaccine and be able to travel freely again, without all the hassle and fuss.

I had breakfast and drove over to my parents’ house.

Also that summer, my sisters and I had planned to talk about how to take care of our parents as they were aging. So my parents’ house was where most of my nieces, nephews, and sisters were, along with my mother with dementia and my father who was just plain slowing down. We were all happy to be together, joking about family, home, and more.

I had an appointment to get my vaccine at the historic pharmacy in town. It’s a pharmacy that still had the black-and-white square tile floor, with a counter that served sodas with flavors from the 1950s, and where they sold gifts, medicine, witty signs, and other knick-knacks. When it was my turn to go downtown to get vaccinated at the pharmacy, 4 of my nieces opted to walk downtown with me to hang out at the pharmacy and tootle around. We walked happily together – it’s less than a mile from the house to the pharmacy. My father had offered to go with us, but I told him not to worry, it would be a quick trip, and I preferred getting the exercise.

While I sat in the waiting chair, the woman working in the vaccination area of the pharmacy asked me which vaccine I had chosen to get. In Spain, two of my students were people intimately involved in the region’s vaccine rollout, and they had said me it didn’t matter which vaccine I got, as long as I got one. So, being in the US for such a short time, I had decided to get the J&J (Jenssen in Spain) – it was a single dose and after that day I was going to be able to live normally. So I told her, “Johnson and Johnson.”

She looked at me and handed me some paperwork to fill out. She knew my father and from my quizzical face, I think she guessed I was the daughter who lived in Spain. She said, “Did you know that J&J was illegal here for a few months, but they’ve allowed it again?” “No,” I said, “I didn’t know that.” “Yes, they said it’s more dangerous for women between 19 and 45.” I realized I fell into this bracket of the population. “Oh,” I said, and thought about the advice I’d received in Spain, and what are the odds? “No big deal,” I said, “I’ll get it.”

Another woman also waiting for her vaccine told me, “My friend got it and said she just felt some flutters in her heart, but otherwise she felt fine.” This comforted me, and I thanked her and a couple minutes later was called back to get the vaccine. After the doctor gave it to me, she told me I should sit at the tables by the bar and wait about 15 minutes.

I went to the table – the nieces admiring stuffed animals – and felt the palpitations. It was like a pressure line from the vaccination site up my arm to my heart. I thought about calling out to one of the nieces to come be with me because I wasn’t feeling completely stable. But there were a lot of people there having breakfast, and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I took out my cell phone to write a message to my husband (still in Spain, in his first days of a new job), started typing and…

I was coming back to consciousness and the nieces were standing over me, looking down at me. I couldn’t feel my hands or forearms. I told them so, and the oldest told me to try to move my hands to get the circulation back. I did and little by little that happened. The doctor who had given me the vaccine came running. Others were watching me from the counter, including my grandfather’s retired secretary.

In time my father, my sister, and finally the emergency medical technicians arrived. I didn’t want to go with in the ambulance: I was thinking about the costs of a hospital visit and I didn’t know if the Spanish insurance would pay (it did, mostly). In the end, my father encouraged me to go with them so I did.

I felt strange, mostly scared, a bit shocked. At the hospital they told me that nothing was wrong with me and that I would just have to wait two days for the vaccine’s effects to dissipate.

During that month, I went to the hospital 3 times, with three different diagnoses, and none of them were head trauma. The correct diagnosis came to me at the end of the month, before I returned to Spain. But I didn’t believe it. Between neurologists, doctors at the hospital and a young doctor, it was the latter who diagnosed me correctly.

But I didn’t believe it. Why?

Because as a child I had fallen down the wooden stairs at home, lost consciousness, and then in theory I was fine.

Because in high school I had my first concussion playing soccer – my eyes went cloudy for a few minutes after a really good header. A few minutes later, I was back in the game.

Because in college I had my second and third concussions playing soccer – the same thing cloudy-eye thing happened, and although I had the feeling that afterwards my ability to find vocabulary, to speak quickly, and to memorize diminished, nothing was definitive and nobody at that time knew how to diagnose head traumas, if it wasn’t accompanied by internal bleeding or something physically provable.

A year later, I was finally convinced that I had Persistent Post-Concussion Syndrome (PPCS/PCS), a form of TBI – contrary to what the at least eight doctors, including two neurologists and a psychiatrist had said.

And that’s why I write this blog. I learned most of what I learned through blogs, communities and organizations adjacent to the medical field – and all in English.* I want to open a space for those of us who suffer from this. First so that we know that what we suffer from is real, and second to give hope. In the past, this condition was lifelong. But not anymore. It can be improved. Let’s do it together.

*Note: this blog was originally published in Spanish only. It has recently become bilingual: Spanish/English.