Photo source; cbsnews.com
In 2019, Vanessa Abraham, a dedicated speech pathologist, began to feel unwell—her symptoms eerily resembled the flu. Her body throbbed with fatigue, and her voice, typically resonant and confident, turned hoarse and weak. After receiving antibiotics to no avail, she assumed time would mend her illness.
But time brought no healing—only collapse. One night, she awoke gasping for air, unable to stand. Her husband rushed her to a local hospital, where her condition deteriorated rapidly. Within hours, Vanessa found herself in the ICU, connected to a ventilator that kept her alive but stole her voice. Her limbs refused to obey. She was slipping into a state that mimicked paralysis.
With local physicians unable to determine the cause, she was transferred to UC San Diego Health. It was there she encountered Jared Rosen—a medical student on his ICU rotation—whose role would extend far beyond clinical duties. While specialists probed for answers, Vanessa remained trapped in a body that would not move and a mind that could not speak. Her neck lacked the strength to lift her head, and terror rooted itself deep in her psyche, according to CBS News.
“I was lucid,” she recounted to CBS News. “And it was an experience darker than anything I ever envisioned for myself.”
Though unable to speak, Abraham found solace in Rosen’s quiet presence. Unburdened by the rush of the medical hierarchy, he stayed beside her, gently helping her devise ways to communicate and grounding her amidst the chaos.
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Her sore throat turned into a long ICU stay. The cause stumped doctors for months. – CBS News
Vanessa Abraham thought her symptoms were a bad flu — until she collapsed to the floor struggling to breathe.
Source: CBS News
As weeks passed, her body began a slow rebellion against the paralysis. The ventilator was removed. She left the ICU after a month. But her liberation was bittersweet—no diagnosis had yet emerged, and uncertainty continued to shadow her.
“There was no definition, no name. And that unknown was the most terrifying part,” she said.
The Elusive Diagnosis
Discharged from intensive care, Abraham’s fight continued. Her right arm remained immobile, and swallowing remained a herculean task. She was ushered into physical rehabilitation, voice therapy, and psychological counseling. Depression gnawed at her resolve, at times so oppressive that the idea of ending her life became a haunting whisper, as per CBS News.
In her search for grounding, she reached out to Rosen months later. She found his email, unsure if he would remember her. When he replied with warmth and recognition, her spirit ignited. “It brought tears to my eyes,” she said. “That one moment brought back a flicker of hope.”
Four months after her initial collapse, her long-awaited answer finally came. She had a rare neurological disorder—Guillain-Barré syndrome—but not its common manifestation. Instead, she suffered from its most enigmatic offshoot: the pharyngeal-cervical-brachial variant, which targets the diaphragm and throat, impairing speech and respiration.
“This variant is incredibly elusive,” explained Dr. Kiril Kiprovski, a neurologist at NYU Langone. “It’s diagnosed almost entirely based on clinical intuition, and most doctors never encounter it.”
Only about one in 78,000 people is diagnosed with Guillain-Barré each year, and less than 3% of those have this particular form. In Abraham’s case, the disease had struck her respiratory and cranial nerves first—an inversion of the usual progression from feet to head.
With a name finally pinned to the ghost in her body, she began intravenous immunoglobulin therapy—a treatment designed to flood her immune system with protective antibodies from donors, according to CBS News.
Healing in Motion
Recovery was neither swift nor linear. Abraham had to reckon with a brutal truth: healing from neurological trauma is an excruciating, unglamorous marathon.
“I had to rewire my mind to understand this was going to take time,” she shared. “That’s how neuro recovery works. You wait. You work. You hope.”
Now, six years removed from her nightmare, Abraham continues to carry residual neuromuscular weakness, but her life has slowly reassembled. She has returned to her role as a speech pathologist—her experience of silence is now a profound connection to patients who have lost their voices.
Her days are anchored in movement: weightlifting, therapy, and resilience. And her bond with Rosen has endured. Now a critical care fellow at UC Davis Medical Center, Rosen credits Abraham’s case with fueling his devotion to intensive care medicine.
But Vanessa’s recovery wasn’t just of the body. She joined a support group for ICU trauma survivors, finding camaraderie in shared stories of fear, grief, and rediscovery. She became a vocal advocate for such groups, championing the healing that extends beyond medicine. She even wrote a memoir—documenting the liminal space between paralysis and power, as noted by CBS News.
“Recovery isn’t just about regaining strength,” she said. “It’s about reassembling who you are after the storm has passed.”
