Latest news with #neurologist
Yahoo
41 minutes ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Days Of Our Lives' Actor Al Calderon Joins NBC's ‘Brilliant Minds' For Season 2
EXCLUSIVE: Al Calderon (Days of Our Lives, Step Up: Highwater) has been cast in NBC's Brilliant Minds for Season 2, premiering in September. He joins fellow incoming series regulars Brian Altemus and John Clarence Stewart. Inspired by the life and work of author and physician Oliver Sacks, Brilliant Minds follows Dr. Oliver Wolf (Zachary Quinto), a revolutionary, larger-than-life neurologist, and his team of interns as they explore the last great frontier – the human mind – while grappling with their own relationships and mental health. More from Deadline Bellamy Young To Go Toe-To-Toe With Zachary Quinto In 'Brilliant Minds' Season 2 'The Hunting Party' & 'Brilliant Minds' Renewed For Season 2; NBC Plans To 'Lean Into' Them In 2025-26 NBC Sets Universal Epic Universe Special With Joe Manganiello, Bowen Yang, Michelle Yeoh, Steven Spielberg & More Calderon will play Nurse Scotty Silva, who runs the hospital and looks good doing it. With charisma to spare, he's widely regarded as the Mayor of Bronx General. His warm, funny and outgoing charm may or may not be the reason why he knows everything about everyone at work. The cast also includes Tamberla Perry, Ashleigh LaThrop, Alex MacNicoll, Aury Krebs, Spence Moore II, Teddy Sears and Donna Murphy. Bellamy Young recently joined as a recurring guest star. Michael Grassi serves as writer and executive producer. Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter, Leigh London Redman, Lee Toland Krieger, DeMane Davis, Henrik Bastin, Andy Serkis, Jonathan Cavendish and Will Tennant also executive produce. Berlanti Productions, Fabel Entertainment, The Imaginarium, Grassi Productions and Tavala produce in association with Warner Bros. Television and Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group. Calderon is a bilingual actor, singer and dancer whose work spans Broadway (13: A New Musical) and television (Days of Our Lives, Step Up: Highwater). Of Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Caucasian descent, Calderon is coming off a contract role on Days of Our Lives, but continues to play Javi Hernandez on the long-running Peacock sudser, returning with new episodes in 2026. He was a former series regular in both YouTube Red/Starz's dance series Step Up: Highwater & Snapchat's Dead Girl's Detective Agency. His screen credits include Ryan Murphy's Grotesquerie, Max's Minx, AMC's The Walking Dead: World Beyond, OWN's The Haves and the Have Nots, and the Fox pilot Amy's Brother opposite Melissa McCarthy. On the feature side, he appeared in Detachment, Stealing Cars and the musical drama Hello Again opposite Audra McDonald and Martha Plimpton. Calderon is repped by AKA Talent Agency, Cultured Artists, and Felker Toczek Suddleson. Best of Deadline 2025 TV Series Renewals: Photo Gallery 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Emmys, Oscars, Grammys & More 2025 TV Cancellations: Photo Gallery Solve the daily Crossword
Free Malaysia Today
a day ago
- Health
- Free Malaysia Today
Not just forgetfulness: dementia, a silent epidemic
Globally, dementia affects more than 55 million people, with the WHO predicting this number will reach 78 million by 2030. (Freepik pic) KUALA LUMPUR : Dementia often begins subtly – a forgotten name, a repeated story, a misplaced item. But contrary to widespread belief, this condition is not just about old-age forgetfulness – in Malaysia, it is a silent epidemic, driven by an ageing population and widespread chronic illnesses like diabetes and high blood pressure. With nearly 16% of the population being age 60 and above, studies suggest that over 200,000 Malaysians are living with dementia. Soberingly, this figure is likely underestimated because of low awareness and limited screening. Globally, dementia affects more than 55 million people, and the World Health Organization predicts this number will reach 78 million by 2030. 'When someone can no longer perform the tasks they once managed easily, such as cooking or holding a conversation, that's when we begin to suspect it could be dementia,' said consultant neurologist Dr Mohamad Imran Idris. 'The hallmark of dementia isn't just forgetfulness; it is when thinking skills interfere with daily life – language, judgement, even recognising familiar faces. That is when it is time to get help.' Dr Mohamad Imran Idris. Imran also clarified the difference between dementia and Alzheimer's disease, explaining that the latter is just one type of dementia. 'Dementia is an umbrella term. Alzheimer's is the most well-known, but in Malaysia, vascular dementia – caused by impaired blood flow to the brain, often after a stroke or due to chronic illnesses – is also very common,' he said. According to Imran, conditions such as hypertension, high cholesterol and diabetes are key contributors to vascular dementia. Notably, the doctor stressed that dementia is no longer an old person's disease. 'It's not just grandma or grandpa anymore. We've seen people in their 40s and even 30s developing early signs after strokes or years of unmanaged chronic illness.' While there is no cure for dementia, the good news is, certain medicines can slow its progression. Additionally, screening tools, from digital cognitive assessments to blood tests that detect early brain changes, are becoming more accessible, Imran said. Individuals both young and old should invest early in their future cognitive health. (Envato Elements pic) In the meantime, it's important for everyone to keep their brain healthy and engaged. While diet and exercise are known brain boosters, socialising also plays a powerful role. 'Talking with friends, engaging in conversation – these spontaneous, unpredictable interactions challenge the brain and help preserve cognitive function,' Imran added. Ultimately, those in their 40s and 50s should start thinking seriously about their brain health, on top of controlling their blood pressure, staying socially engaged, sleeping well, and eating a balanced diet. 'These aren't just good habits – they're investments in your future cognitive health. If we care for our hearts to avoid a heart attack, we should do the same for our brains,' he concluded.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Yahoo
A Drunk Driver Crashed Into Me. When I Woke Up, I Was A Completely Different Person.
On a Tuesday morning in 2006 in Dutchess County, New York, a woman ran out of beer. She was drunk at 10 a.m. but not as drunk as she wanted to be, so she stole a truck, procured a case of Bud, then crushed a parked car. I was in the parked car. EMTs pried me out. I woke up in a freezing room where techs were extracting sharp things from my skin. It was a Code 4 emergency, which means my life was threatened. Then it wasn't my life. The good news was that I survived. The bad news was brain damage. Years later, a neurologist said I suffered the same type of injury that former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords suffered when she was shot in the head. ,So were my legs and my arms and my feet. Post-truck, I was parked with trauma patients, rolling Play-Doh balls and pounding pegs in boards. We included a former physician, a former professor of psycholinguistics, a former custodian and a former owner of a kebab café. There's not much demand for brain-damaged writers. Since I couldn't comprehend — leave alone manage — business affairs, an attorney completed my last career financial transaction which was refunding a five-figure advance to a client known from Burundi to Beverly Hills. To pay mounting bills, he was forced to sell our home. This was all far above my new head. Movers I can't recall packed boxes I can't recall for a trip I could not wrap my head around. I landed in a sleepy southern town east of somewhere and west of somewhere else in a rambling wooden farmhouse peering out from tangled brush. It was nine hours south of my old life and my child. No trace of the move remains in my mind — it's like it didn't happen or I wasn't there. I rarely recalled I'd been moved to Virginia. This means I wondered if I should move to a place I already lived in, or leave a place I already left. My child stayed in college in New York while I spent one year in outpatient therapy. I relearned how to walk, how to talk, how to place my hands on a keyboard, how to read, how to write, how to make a cup of tea. Three years post-truck, the Social Security Disability Administration ruled my injuries were 'permanent and incurable.' Still, my daughter's 'diagnosis' was by far the worst. She said her mom disappeared. In my first life, I made sense of thousands of stories on global warming and lip gloss and sports bras and organized closets and candidates. Normal people do things like that, plus wake up, brush teeth, get dressed, eat breakfast, get kids to school, keep clients happy and clean dryer lint. It felt like I had been thrown from a plane. Then it felt like trying to piece together any remnants of the person I was before I was thrown out of the plane. And then? It kept feeling that way. Most of us lose people we love. I lost the person I was. Related: The author several years after the accident. Related: The new 'me' had never read books I loved, never shared favorite times with my child. They tested my brain hundreds of times and found lots of things bit the dust, like the file that encodes new memories, and the file that integrates physical movements so you don't fly down the steps or fall out of your chair. I lost what happened a minute ago, a page ago, a lifetime ago. This is called amnesia. Amnesia can take anything and make it disappear. Your child's first words. Your mom's last words. Mine came with a side of aphasia. That means I couldn't find the words I needed or put them together so they made sense. I said stuff like 'white stuff sky,' which meant snow, or 'cow thing pants' which meant belt or 'green thing dirt,' which meant plant. Words often seemed to start mid-sentence — and end there, too. There are three stages of making a memory: encoding (which means you learn something), consolidation (which means you store it), and recall (which means you can find it again). Learning was hard. Storing was hard. Recall was almost impossible. I was impaired and could not be repaired. A doctor told me so. There's an irony: The drunk woman who hit me was impaired, too. You may wonder if 'insurers' covered health care bills or compensated me for pain and suffering. The answer is no. The drunk driver had three prior DUIs and no longer had a license or insurance. Because she had stolen the truck she was driving, the owner's insurance didn't pay either. The car I was in was parked and I was waiting for the woman who owned it to return, so she was not at fault and her insurer didn't pay. As a result, most of the massive medical bills were paid by me, or rather the power of attorney on my behalf. Health insurance did not/does not cover motor vehicle accidents. I encountered a Catch-22 that removed me from outpatient rehab at the end of year one, which may or may not have been linked to insurance, too. Or, rather, lack of it. The head guy (pun intended) in neuro rehab decided I was both too screwed-up and not screwed-up enough to keep receiving help. If I were more screwed up, they could do something. If I were less screwed-up, they could do something. But I wasn't, so they couldn't. And, so, I relearned to read under the patient care of no one at all. I achieved mixed results. In year two post-accident, I began trying to read a book. I read the same pages for two years. At first, they meant nothing. Then they meant something, for a few seconds. If I began where I'd left off, say on page 5, and found a character was on a train, I had no idea why he was on it or where he was going. At the same time, I started scratching anything I could recall on any surface I could find — paper plates, paper cups, placemats, napkins, coffee stirrers and Popsicle sticks. I called them scraps. They were not in alphabetical order, not in numerical order, not in chronological order, but out of order, like me. I stuffed them in brown paper shopping bags and then stashed the bags in a closet. A few years ago, Google provided 115,000,000 ways to 'clear your mind.' These included clearing your mind of stress, clearing your mind of guilt, clearing your mind of clutter, clearing your mind of negative thoughts, clearing your cookies, clearing your cache, clearing your sinuses, and clearing your mind of all thought. I had. I also found 8,310,000 jokes about brain injury on Google. Plus, of course, in cartoons all over the planet, people like us are hilarious, especially when our skulls get smashed. Think baseball bats, rifle butts, and coconuts on craniums. The intact brain is amazing. The three-pound blob remembers the theme music for The Flintstones, the name of your fifth-grade French teacher, and your childhood phone number. But put it through a windshield at 70 miles an hour,r and then it's a crapshoot. You might remember something that happened a moment ago, or you might not. You might not walk or talk again. You might wake up as an entirely different person. Or you might never wake up. Seven years ago, I began attending a newly formed brain trauma group. One member, Daniel, 'came back' from two weeks in a coma. Daniel's counselor says that the 'old' Daniel is gone. The new Daniel has new frontal lobes and a new personality, as well as the wife of his former self and three kids he can't name. Another member, Mel, kept saying, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' like he did something wrong. We were told most of us were in the program due to someone driving while drunk. A recent photo of the author. Brain trauma is not about the past: the successes, accomplishments, accolades. It's not even about losses. It's a muddy, rutty, hands and knees crawl up to the first rung of the ladder, and up each rung after that. There is no cure. I'm sharing this story not because I think it is exceptional, but because I know it is not. Many others with similar stories can't write because they're more disabled than I am or because they lost their lives. We all have plaque in our brain — some of us know it. Plaque can advance like armies in the night, taking more and more of us, leaving less and less. You take a detour when you see us coming, and think we don't notice, but we do. In 2021, the latest year for which there are numbers, the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration (NHSTA) reported 401,520 Americans were killed or injured due to someone driving while drunk. Also according to NHSTA, two out of three Americans will be impacted by drunk driving in their lifetime. Every day, lives of adults and kids are taken by impaired drivers who gain a few seconds, then take a few lives. Each statistic is a person. Each death is preventable, as is each injury. According to a recent article in The New York Times Magazine, 'From 2020 to 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has since calculated, the number of crashes in the United States soared 16 percent, to more than six million, or roughly 16,500 wrecks a day.' The article goes on to point out that, 'For public-messaging reasons, vehicular wrecks are almost never referred to by experts as 'accidents,' wording that implies no culpability on the part of the participants.' The fatality figures were somehow even worse. In 2021, the latest year for which there are figures, 42,939 Americans died in car crashes, the highest toll in a decade and a half. 'Of those deaths, a sizable portion involved intoxicated or unrestrained drivers or vehicles traveling well in excess of local speed limits.' This would be a different story if I regained my former life, complete with my former mind. I didn't. Eighteen years post-accident. I still think with a stutter, speak with a limp, and have less usable space in my brain, so I run out of memory fast. Today I had two coins in my hand. One was a dime and one was a nickel, and I didn't know which was which. I can spackle all I want but underneath I'm still broken. I frustrate others by leaning on them and by not leaning on them, and baffle them when I seem normal and when I don't. It takes decades to build a life, and seconds to destroy it. The next time someone warns you to be careful when driving home from a night out, don't roll your eyes. Heed their warning. Disabled people are the single largest minority in the world, and likely the least heard from. We are also the only minority anyone can join at any time. Trust me, you won't want to be disabled — or to take someone's life. Judith Hannah Weiss freelanced for 25 years, writing print and broadcast promotion for New York, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue and other major media. In 2006, she was hit by a drunk driver, which put things on a long pause. Her post-accident work has appeared on NBC News and in The Washington Post, The Oldster, Iowa Review, The Rumpus, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, Memoir Monday and The Pulse. You can find her on Substack at and at This article originally appeared on HuffPost in April 2024. Also in Goodful: Also in Goodful: Also in Goodful:
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Yahoo
A Drunk Driver Crashed Into Me. When I Woke Up, I Was A Completely Different Person.
On a Tuesday morning in 2006 in Dutchess County, New York, a woman ran out of beer. She was drunk at 10 a.m. but not as drunk as she wanted to be, so she stole a truck, procured a case of Bud, then crushed a parked car. I was in the parked car. EMTs pried me out. I woke up in a freezing room where techs were extracting sharp things from my skin. It was a Code 4 emergency, which means my life was threatened. Then it wasn't my life. The good news was that I survived. The bad news was brain damage. Years later, a neurologist said I suffered the same type of injury that former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords suffered when she was shot in the head. ,So were my legs and my arms and my feet. Post-truck, I was parked with trauma patients, rolling Play-Doh balls and pounding pegs in boards. We included a former physician, a former professor of psycholinguistics, a former custodian and a former owner of a kebab café. There's not much demand for brain-damaged writers. Since I couldn't comprehend — leave alone manage — business affairs, an attorney completed my last career financial transaction which was refunding a five-figure advance to a client known from Burundi to Beverly Hills. To pay mounting bills, he was forced to sell our home. This was all far above my new head. Movers I can't recall packed boxes I can't recall for a trip I could not wrap my head around. I landed in a sleepy southern town east of somewhere and west of somewhere else in a rambling wooden farmhouse peering out from tangled brush. It was nine hours south of my old life and my child. No trace of the move remains in my mind — it's like it didn't happen or I wasn't there. I rarely recalled I'd been moved to Virginia. This means I wondered if I should move to a place I already lived in, or leave a place I already left. My child stayed in college in New York while I spent one year in outpatient therapy. I relearned how to walk, how to talk, how to place my hands on a keyboard, how to read, how to write, how to make a cup of tea. Three years post-truck, the Social Security Disability Administration ruled my injuries were 'permanent and incurable.' Still, my daughter's 'diagnosis' was by far the worst. She said her mom disappeared. In my first life, I made sense of thousands of stories on global warming and lip gloss and sports bras and organized closets and candidates. Normal people do things like that, plus wake up, brush teeth, get dressed, eat breakfast, get kids to school, keep clients happy and clean dryer lint. It felt like I had been thrown from a plane. Then it felt like trying to piece together any remnants of the person I was before I was thrown out of the plane. And then? It kept feeling that way. Most of us lose people we love. I lost the person I was. Related: The author several years after the accident. Related: The new 'me' had never read books I loved, never shared favorite times with my child. They tested my brain hundreds of times and found lots of things bit the dust, like the file that encodes new memories, and the file that integrates physical movements so you don't fly down the steps or fall out of your chair. I lost what happened a minute ago, a page ago, a lifetime ago. This is called amnesia. Amnesia can take anything and make it disappear. Your child's first words. Your mom's last words. Mine came with a side of aphasia. That means I couldn't find the words I needed or put them together so they made sense. I said stuff like 'white stuff sky,' which meant snow, or 'cow thing pants' which meant belt or 'green thing dirt,' which meant plant. Words often seemed to start mid-sentence — and end there, too. There are three stages of making a memory: encoding (which means you learn something), consolidation (which means you store it), and recall (which means you can find it again). Learning was hard. Storing was hard. Recall was almost impossible. I was impaired and could not be repaired. A doctor told me so. There's an irony: The drunk woman who hit me was impaired, too. You may wonder if 'insurers' covered health care bills or compensated me for pain and suffering. The answer is no. The drunk driver had three prior DUIs and no longer had a license or insurance. Because she had stolen the truck she was driving, the owner's insurance didn't pay either. The car I was in was parked and I was waiting for the woman who owned it to return, so she was not at fault and her insurer didn't pay. As a result, most of the massive medical bills were paid by me, or rather the power of attorney on my behalf. Health insurance did not/does not cover motor vehicle accidents. I encountered a Catch-22 that removed me from outpatient rehab at the end of year one, which may or may not have been linked to insurance, too. Or, rather, lack of it. The head guy (pun intended) in neuro rehab decided I was both too screwed-up and not screwed-up enough to keep receiving help. If I were more screwed up, they could do something. If I were less screwed-up, they could do something. But I wasn't, so they couldn't. And, so, I relearned to read under the patient care of no one at all. I achieved mixed results. In year two post-accident, I began trying to read a book. I read the same pages for two years. At first, they meant nothing. Then they meant something, for a few seconds. If I began where I'd left off, say on page 5, and found a character was on a train, I had no idea why he was on it or where he was going. At the same time, I started scratching anything I could recall on any surface I could find — paper plates, paper cups, placemats, napkins, coffee stirrers and Popsicle sticks. I called them scraps. They were not in alphabetical order, not in numerical order, not in chronological order, but out of order, like me. I stuffed them in brown paper shopping bags and then stashed the bags in a closet. A few years ago, Google provided 115,000,000 ways to 'clear your mind.' These included clearing your mind of stress, clearing your mind of guilt, clearing your mind of clutter, clearing your mind of negative thoughts, clearing your cookies, clearing your cache, clearing your sinuses, and clearing your mind of all thought. I had. I also found 8,310,000 jokes about brain injury on Google. Plus, of course, in cartoons all over the planet, people like us are hilarious, especially when our skulls get smashed. Think baseball bats, rifle butts, and coconuts on craniums. The intact brain is amazing. The three-pound blob remembers the theme music for The Flintstones, the name of your fifth-grade French teacher, and your childhood phone number. But put it through a windshield at 70 miles an hour,r and then it's a crapshoot. You might remember something that happened a moment ago, or you might not. You might not walk or talk again. You might wake up as an entirely different person. Or you might never wake up. Seven years ago, I began attending a newly formed brain trauma group. One member, Daniel, 'came back' from two weeks in a coma. Daniel's counselor says that the 'old' Daniel is gone. The new Daniel has new frontal lobes and a new personality, as well as the wife of his former self and three kids he can't name. Another member, Mel, kept saying, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' like he did something wrong. We were told most of us were in the program due to someone driving while drunk. A recent photo of the author. Brain trauma is not about the past: the successes, accomplishments, accolades. It's not even about losses. It's a muddy, rutty, hands and knees crawl up to the first rung of the ladder, and up each rung after that. There is no cure. I'm sharing this story not because I think it is exceptional, but because I know it is not. Many others with similar stories can't write because they're more disabled than I am or because they lost their lives. We all have plaque in our brain — some of us know it. Plaque can advance like armies in the night, taking more and more of us, leaving less and less. You take a detour when you see us coming, and think we don't notice, but we do. In 2021, the latest year for which there are numbers, the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration (NHSTA) reported 401,520 Americans were killed or injured due to someone driving while drunk. Also according to NHSTA, two out of three Americans will be impacted by drunk driving in their lifetime. Every day, lives of adults and kids are taken by impaired drivers who gain a few seconds, then take a few lives. Each statistic is a person. Each death is preventable, as is each injury. According to a recent article in The New York Times Magazine, 'From 2020 to 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has since calculated, the number of crashes in the United States soared 16 percent, to more than six million, or roughly 16,500 wrecks a day.' The article goes on to point out that, 'For public-messaging reasons, vehicular wrecks are almost never referred to by experts as 'accidents,' wording that implies no culpability on the part of the participants.' The fatality figures were somehow even worse. In 2021, the latest year for which there are figures, 42,939 Americans died in car crashes, the highest toll in a decade and a half. 'Of those deaths, a sizable portion involved intoxicated or unrestrained drivers or vehicles traveling well in excess of local speed limits.' This would be a different story if I regained my former life, complete with my former mind. I didn't. Eighteen years post-accident. I still think with a stutter, speak with a limp, and have less usable space in my brain, so I run out of memory fast. Today I had two coins in my hand. One was a dime and one was a nickel, and I didn't know which was which. I can spackle all I want but underneath I'm still broken. I frustrate others by leaning on them and by not leaning on them, and baffle them when I seem normal and when I don't. It takes decades to build a life, and seconds to destroy it. The next time someone warns you to be careful when driving home from a night out, don't roll your eyes. Heed their warning. Disabled people are the single largest minority in the world, and likely the least heard from. We are also the only minority anyone can join at any time. Trust me, you won't want to be disabled — or to take someone's life. Judith Hannah Weiss freelanced for 25 years, writing print and broadcast promotion for New York, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue and other major media. In 2006, she was hit by a drunk driver, which put things on a long pause. Her post-accident work has appeared on NBC News and in The Washington Post, The Oldster, Iowa Review, The Rumpus, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, Memoir Monday and The Pulse. You can find her on Substack at and at This article originally appeared on HuffPost in April 2024. Also in Goodful: Also in Goodful: Also in Goodful:
Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Health
- Daily Mail
Doctors dismissed my symptoms as a sinus infection... a year later I found out I had a deadly brain tumor
Long before becoming a patient, Ilene Sue Ruhoy was a prominent neurologist in Seattle, accustomed to treating disease. She had been practicing for a decade when, in 2014, she noticed mounting fatigue, dizziness, nausea, migraines, and irritability that various doctors chalked up to stress, a hormone imbalance, and a sinus infection. None of them, she felt, truly listened or took her symptoms seriously. In August 2015, after a year of asking doctors to order her an MRI, one of them finally listened, and what appeared on the scan changed the course of her life entirely. At the emergency room, doctors informed her that she had a tumor called a meningioma the size of an apple pressing on the left side of her brain so forcefully that both hemispheres were being pushed to the right side of her skull. While not classified as cancer, meningiomas can be deadly if complications arise, boasting a mortality rate of anywhere from 63 to 90 percent. She underwent multiple surgeries to seal off the blood vessel feeding the tumor in the hopes of preventing it from growing larger, followed by a procedure to remove the mass in its entirety. 'It's only when I look back in time and think through those appointments and the conversations, and I was at the point where I was begging people to believe me,' Ruhoy told 'The sad part is that if someone had believed me earlier on, I think I could have prevented a lot of the recurrences that I had to go through because I've now undergone three rounds of radiation to my brain.' Ruhoy was healthy before her medical crisis, like many of her current patients. She questioned how this could have happened, feeling she had done everything right. During her quest for answers, Ruhoy complained of light sensitivity and severe, long-lasting migraines that doctors told her were due to her stressful job as a neurologist in a hospital. She said one doctor stayed glued to their computer and failed to even make eye contact with her. Another told her, after she begged for an MRI because she knew something was wrong, that he 'didn't want to feed into the hysteria by ordering an MRI.' She said 'Looking back, I think that I just wasn't cognizant of what was really happening when it was happening. 'And it's only when I look back in time and think through those appointments and basically I was at the point where I was like begging people to believe me, because things just were getting worse for me.' Around nine months into her illness, before being diagnosed, she found a primary care doctor and as soon as Ruhoy walked into her new doctor's office, she began to sob, telling the physician that she had reached her wit's end. 'All I said was, please, just order me an MRI. And she said the famous words, "when a neurologist asks you to order a brain MRI, you order a brain MRI,"' Ruhoy said. 'I remember that moment when she just agreed and I almost hugged her. I didn't, I should have, but I was just so grateful, and I will always be grateful.' Ruhoy still does not know definitively what caused her own tumor. She said: 'I have a PhD in environmental toxicology, so I've thought long and hard about this; what exposures have I had in my life, what infections have I had in my life. 'Once I was diagnosed, I underwent a big workup, led by myself, to try to answer that exact question, and I really came up with nothing. We don't really know what causes these tumors.' Inspired by her own journey, Ruhoy would come to specialize in complex post-exposure illnesses (PEIs), such as long Covid and chronic fatigue syndrome. People with poorly understood chronic illnesses fed by exposure to certain medications, pathogens, or trauma generally describe feeling 'gaslit' by their doctors who don't adequately listen to their concerns, often brush them off as being due to stress, give up trying to treat patients, and alienate them. She vowed to help patients who have felt let down by the medical establishment and to not allow them to leave her office without setting forth on the path to recovery. PEIs encompass several diagnoses marked by a wide array of symptoms. According to Ruhoy, exposure can be to anything external and does not always involve an infection. For instance, she said, long-term exposure to pesticides or mold have been linked to cases of Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, and chronic fatigue syndrome. Her newfound career treating PEIs began with Danielle, a dancer in her early 30s who developed debilitating joint pain, food allergies, hives, swelling in her hands and feet, dizziness, headaches, and neck pain. Many of her patients today are on their fourth or fifth healthcare professional in their quest to figure out what is driving their symptoms. Danielle was no different. She asked Danielle a laundry list of questions, questions no doctor had asked her before: Did she ever have any pain disorders? Did family members have similar symptoms to hers? Did she choke a lot? Did she have chest pain? A detailed blood test revealed Danielle's hypothyroidism, missed by other doctors who hadn't ordered a comprehensive panel. This likely caused her fatigue, menstrual issues, hair loss, bloating, and skin changes. Dr Ruhoy addressed each symptom: an MRI uncovered a misdiagnosed spinal problem, treated with muscle relaxants; medication stabilized her dizziness; and specialists managed her heart and joint pain. Within months, Danielle felt significantly better. In addition to treating patients' symptoms with medication, Ruhoy recommends drug-free treatments: being active, even for a short walk, time in nature, and following a consistent sleep schedule. 'Will you ever be 'normal' again? It's a question I hear often from patients, and unfortunately— if by 'normal' you mean a full return to the person you were before this chronic illness... I can't promise that you will,' Ruhoy wrote in her book Invisible No More. 'However, if you care for yourself, if you remain diligent in the ways we have discussed, and if you attend to your body and listen to the signals it sends you… then you have a great chance of being well. Very well, even.'
