(Nancy Valko RN, ALNC) – When 28 year old Jacob Haendel was rushed to an emergency room in Massachusetts four years ago, the doctors thought he was having a stroke but brain scans showed something very different. Instead, his brain scans showed that his “brain seemed to be unplugging itself from the rest of his body”. One doctor described it as “The wires weren’t sending signals from place to place.”
The doctors were unsure what was going on until Jacob revealed that he had been doing drugs, mostly opioids, until he turned to street heroin. The medical team thought he might have ingested a toxin which led to their diagnosis of a very rare condition called: Toxic Acute Progressive Leukoencephalopathy. Only a few dozen people had ever been diagnosed with this. CONTINUE