(WBIR-MARYVILLE) She remembers that morning last March.
"I got up and started out of the room. My husband was behind me. And I just fell to the floor," Mary Lynn Long said. "I couldn't stand up. I had no legs."
Losing feeling in the legs and hands. Those were the same symptoms Mary Lynn Long's sister had when she was diagnosed with MS, Multiple Sclerosis. But tests at UT Medical Center showed she had something else.
"They came back and told us it was Guillain-Barre Syndrome," she said.
Her immune system was attacking her nerves, paralyzing some of her muscles.
Intense treatment started her journey to recovery.
"Five day intravenous treatment. Immunoglobulin. And I could feel my hands coming back. I didn't have use of my hands. My husband was feeding me. I still couldn't stand up, but that treatment helped," she recalled.
After 18 days at UT she went to Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center. That's when she started three hours a day of physical and occupational therapy.
Patricia Neal Clinical Occupational Therapist Mike Orillion said: "The hard thing about Guillain-Barre is there is no excuse. They just get it. They don't know why. They can't blame anything. It's not anything they did."
He was part of her rehab team.
"If you can imagine, just trying to sit up takes a lot of energy," he said.
Mary Lynn Long progressed from a wheelchair to walking between rails and then moved on to a walker.
"I pushed myself up out of the wheelchair and got a hold of the walker and began to take some steps with the walker. And some of the patients there were cheering me on," she said with a laugh.
Now she exercises at home, doing moves her therapists showed her.
"The skill of those therapists, I was so impressed. I told them they had to be the cream of the crop to work there. I just think they worked a miracle for me," she said.
She collapsed one morning in March. Now it is seven months later.
"I'm back. Totally back."
Guillain-Barre syndrome is rare. It strikes about one in 100,000 people.
