Selena Campione suffered from puzzling and debilitating symptoms for almost a year before she was scheduled to get brain surgery.
“I never had any medical problems before in my life,” Campione tells TODAY.com. Last winter, the 36-year-old teacher and mother of two from New Jersey started experiencing tingling and numbness on the right side of her face and body. “Over a course of time, it kept getting worse and worse,” she said.
After visiting multiple neurologists, getting different blood tests and MRIs, Campione still didn’t have a diagnosis. While doctors did find a slight abnormality in the white matter of her brain, says Campione, it was “nothing they were too concerned about.”
Over the next few months, Campione would continue seeing specialists and get nine MRIs in total. She was put on countless medications for everything from seizures to multiple sclerosis, but nothing was helping, she says. “I was being led down different paths and different treatments, with lots of unknowns,” says Campione.
As time went on, her symptoms progressed. “My face would get so swollen it would get stuck and I wouldn’t be able to speak … then I couldn’t feel anything on the right side of my body so I wasn’t able to walk sometimes or use my right arm,” Campione says.
The formerly healthy mom of two experienced episodes of dangerously high blood pressure and a high heart rate, which landed her in the hospital several times, she adds.
Finally, a friend referred Campione to Dr. Nitesh Patel, a neurosurgical oncologist at Hackensack Meridian Neuroscience Institute at Jersey Shore University Medical Center.
“She’s young, only 36 and having these very unusual symptoms, she felt like she was going crazy,” Patel, who is also an associate professor at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, tells TODAY.com. Patel says he suspected Campione’s symptoms were caused by a mass in the left side of her brain, which controls the right side…
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