ATLANTA — An Atlanta teenager and Clark Atlanta University student is getting a chance to get her life back together after a terrifying ordeal that put her in the hospital.
Channel 2’s Linda Stouffer spoke to Onyx Middleton and her mother, Cherise, about the condition that looked like a psychiatric issue, but was really a medical emergency.
It all happened last year while her mother says Onyx was in class.
“She just started crying out of the blue, it became hysterical screaming,” Cherise said.
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That’s what took Onyx from the classroom to critical care.
Her mom said it looked like Onyx was having a mental breakdown and was transferred to a mental health facility.
“Yeah, they thought it was schizophrenia,” Cherise said.
It wasn’t until medical testing in the intensive care unit at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta that the family got an explanation.
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“Honestly a year ago? I don’t remember much at all,” Onyx told Channel 2 Action News.
A doctor at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta was able to diagnose her with an auto-immune condition called anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis.
“It basically shuts down a part of my brain and makes me have seizures,” Onyx said.
Pediatric neurologist Dr. Varun Kannan told Stouffer that it’s possible they’ll never know exactly what triggered Onyx’s immune system to attack her body, but the medical team at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta treated her quickly and carefully with immunotherapy medication.
Kannan said it’s easy to miss the diagnosis of anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis because it looks so similar to a mental health crisis.
“I think with early diagnosis and aggressive treatment, as Onyx received, there can be a really happy outcome,” Kannan said. “There are red flag symptoms, so if you have sudden onset psychosis in a previously healthy teenage young adult, or symptoms like seizures, you really should ask a neurologist ‘could this be something else?’”
Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis has only been studied in the past 20 years.
For Onyx, after 118 days in the hospital, she’s sharing her journey on social media, hoping the next young adult with strange symptoms finds hope.
Onyx told Channel 2 Action News that she’s planning her college comeback now.
“I definitely want to go back and get my degree,” she said.
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