Help get Chan's vision back!

Until contracting COVID-19 in December of 2020, Chan was a healthy 21-year-old. It wasn’t until her hands and arms started going numb that she started to suspect that something might be wrong. In March of 2021, she went to the ER for what she now knows to be her first stroke. However, thrown off by her age, doctors weren’t too worried, and sent her home with a diagnosis of vasovagal syncope and anxiety. She made it three whole months before it happened again.

This time, faced with classic stroke symptoms like facial droop and slurred speech, the doctors finally realized what was really going on. Whereas most people have carotid arteries clocking in at around 4 mm in diameter, Chan’s measured around 0.5 mm. She was transferred to a neurosurgeon, put on heavy blood thinners, corticosteroids, and spent several weeks in the hospital while a team of various specialialists tried to figure out why her arteries were so critically stenosed, and why she had so much inflammation in a part of her head called the cavernous sinus.

When steroids did not seem to encourage the arteries to open on their own, the doctors decided to place metal stents in both of Chan’s carotid arteries to ensure that another stroke did not occur. Both of the operations went well, and for a while, everything seemed stable. Chan moved to New York to start her life as a journalist, and tried her hardest to forget about the whole thing.

That is, until she woke up one day with numbness all throughout her scalp. Upon visiting the ER in NYC, the doctors found a giant mass of inflammation directly behind Chan’s eye, and within the week, her vision started to grow blurry and painful. It was clear she was going to need extensive care, so she booked a flight back home to AZ in December of 2021. The next morning, she woke up completely blind in her right eye.

As of now, doctors still do not know exactly why Chan is blind, but they suspect it is from another stroke. The question as to why these strokes keep occurring and why so much inflammation keeps flaring up, remains unclear. She has been seen by a teaching hospital, the Mayo Clinic (although her insurance does not cover outpatient services), various ophthalmologists, optomologists, neurosurgeons, neurologists, infectious disease doctors, rheumatologists, and more, but she has stumped them all. To this day, she still has no set treatment plan or diagnosis.

The money from this GoFundMe will be used first and foremost for answers. For the necessary doctors appointments, travel, hospital bills, and specialists needed to get Chan her life and vision back.