Law Schools

It’s Much Harder To Take Law School Finals When You're Having A Stroke

Dear god, this sounds horrific. Take a look at this tale of law school woe.

By  
on

Welcome back to Foreseeable Harm, a series where we take a look at some of the most appalling law school horror stories, straight from the law school trenches. These are real e-mails and messages we’ve received from real readers. Take a look at today’s tale of law school woe:

The pre-law collapse. Followed by the even-bigger, in law school collapse.

So there I was, in the last semester of my bachelor’s degree, feverishly studying for my LSATs and two weeks from graduating with honors. Until one day, I was at yoga class and fell backwards onto my head doing a yoga move.

When I got up, I was dizzy. So I went home and laid in bed the rest of the day until I had to get ready for work. The dizziness never went away, and by the time I had got to work at 3:00 p.m., it was so much worse. I walked down the long hallway to clock in. As soon as I returned to my office, I collapsed.

By way of background, my hometown and alma mater are both in very small towns in the Midwest, so podunk with subpar medical care. I was 28 years old at the time. After that day, my life was a blur of losing consciousness, hospitals, ambulances, and specialty doctors. Finally, after the podunk hospital couldn’t figure it out, they transferred me to the big boys at what is supposed to be the best hospital in the country. Sadly, even they couldn’t figure out the problem. I was finally stabilized after a few months and released with no diagnosis. My mom and sister rallied to complete my last homework and final projects for the last two weeks of my bachelor’s while I laid up in the hospital.

I left the hospital, and drove through the night to arrive at my LSAT exam at 8:00 in the morning. Safe to say, I barely had a passing score (in hindsight, I should have asked them not to record it; I almost passed out during the exam).

With no diagnosis, and still having daily “episodes,” as my family called them, I moved one week after receiving my LSAT score in order to attend law school in the fall. (I don’t know how to describe the “episodes,” but later learned they were little strokes. I would go completely white, stop talking mid-sentence, just out of it, then I would start shaking, my legs would give out, and I would collapse.)

Fast forward to my 1L year. I was still getting dizzy every day, could barely make it through class, and had racked up thousands of dollars in medical bills with no diagnosis. I was still having “episodes.” Then it happened. Right in the middle of my three-hour-long contracts final, I suffered an “episode” (read: stroke) that was not a major stroke, but much bigger than any of the previous ones. I was still conscious and knew I had to at least turn in my half-finished exam. But I couldn’t walk. So I just sat there staring at my laptop and semi-drooling. I sat there for the next hour like that, finally handed in the exam that I was sure was nothing but gibberish, and made a quick exit with everything I had left in me to the deserted student lounge bathroom, where I called my boyfriend. He came and got me and took me straight to the ER.

In the end, the doctors at the hospital were finally able to diagnose an autonomic disorder that was caused by a small injury to my spinal cord that happened the day I fell at yoga. The disorder is an electrical issue where my heart and brain don’t give each other the correct signals. This causes my heart rate to shoot up to above 180 and then drop into the 20s in a matter of about two seconds. That’s what was causing the strokes. I still have the condition (albeit properly diagnosed and well-medicated now) and will have it for life.

On the plus side, I got a B on my contracts final.

What’s your law school horror story? You know you have one, so feel free to email us (subject line: “Law School Horror Story”) or text us (646-820-8477) and tell us all about it. We may feature some of them here in an upcoming post on Above the Law.

Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky has been an editor at Above the Law since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Sponsored

Topics

, ,