This is the second in a four-part series exploring University of Oregon junior Calee Williams’ diagnosis of a transverse myelitis. Part three will be published online Wednesday. The final part will appear in Emerald Wknd on Thursday. You can read part one here.

October 2013 – The ticking time bomb

“I’m developing a brain tumor.”

The words linger in solitary for a moment. Calee collects her breath and smiles in annoyance at the tears that gather in the corner of her eyes.

“It’s a hard thing to understand. It’s too small to find in the MRIs right now, but they think it’s in my somatic cortex and that’s what’s causing my numbness,” she said.

Calee gestures at her body – something whose competence she no longer takes for granted.

It’s the day before Halloween and Eugene has finally begun to show evidence of its surrender to the cold winter months ahead. The campus café fills and empties of students whose regular routines are momentarily interrupted for a quick recess. Coffees are ordered and friends tuck themselves into familiar corner booths. A pair of similarly dressed women in colorful scarves and knit sweaters comment about their Halloween plans for the next night.

Calee watches as they pass the table – perhaps in envy of the inconsequentiality of their conversation, yet she shows no sign of grievance.

“This thing that’s growing in my brain – they can’t just take it out because they can’t find it yet,” she says from afar – distracted as she watches the women leave the café in a surge of laughter. “It’s like a ticking time bomb.”

Calee’s neurologist, Dr. Miguel Estevez, can’t confirm if there is a tumor growing in Calee’s brain with certainty. If there is, it’s at such a preliminary stage that it’s undetectable in an MRI scan and might take years to discover. But after hours of shock tests confirming that her nerve circuits aren’t properly connecting, he feels that the possibility of a brain tumor is the likely explanation of Calee’s perplexing symptoms.

For now, Calee can only wait.

November 2013 – The fight to stay enrolled

Calee sits cross-legged on a dark brown couch in her living room, sorting through a jumbled stack of medical records.  Her apartment’s temperature reflects the quickly approaching winter that brews outside the door, yet Calee still sits comfortably in her T-shirt, unaware of her chilly home.

“I haven’t been able to feel temperature in months,” she said. “I don’t have a sense of touch.”

Two identical black cats roam the single bedroom apartment, prowling underneath the thick dark curtains and pawing at their reflection on the glass door that looks out onto a soggy grass field. Rascal, the eldest of the two brothers, presses himself under her arms and into her lap, paws sliding out in either direction as they step on two separate hospital bills.

“Get out of here, Rascal,” she mutters as she shoves the cat, who lands on the floor with a flutter of papers. “There are all kinds of stuff in here,” she murmurs as she fans out the papers on the couch cushion.

Hospital records with their checkmark boxes and tedious, untranslatable language detail blood infusions, drug prescriptions, hospital exams, spinal taps, and MRI’s. And then there are the bills. Piles and piles of bills.

“The bills are stacking up,” she says with a shrug. “My mom won’t tell me the exact details anymore – she doesn’t want to stress me out. I know that my first visit cost about $120,000, but with insurance we only paid $12,000.”

As the appointments and treatments become more frequent and expensive, the financial stress pressured Calee’s mom to apply for disability for her daughter, though her request was denied last month.

“They basically said since I’m a functioning college student, I could also find a job,” Calee says. “So my mom wanted me to drop out of college and move home so I could qualify for disability.”

But Calee is determined to stay. Staying enrolled means a kind of future that no one in her family has yet to achieve. But it’s a daily fight between maintaining grades and convincing her mom to let her stay. Taking classes has become both a struggle and a privilege.

Her goals here are sharply focused. Despite the year’s setbacks, Calee is working toward a double major in anthropology and psychology. But her passion has always been athletics. She played several sports in high school but was forced to quit after a volleyball spike to her right temple caused a major concussion.

It was this experience that inspired her interest in sports psychology — not in the typical sense of the profession that uses psychology to increase optimal performance of athletes, but instead focusing on helping athletes understands and deal with the aftermath of a traumatic head injury.  She knows from her own experience that things such as memory loss, mental fatigue, physical pain, personality shifts or learning disabilities that arise post-concussion can benefit from psychological attention, which she hopes to provide for athletes one day.

The past year of various treatments and hospital visits has further enforced and encouraged this professional goal.

“At first, I just wanted to better understand my own conditions, but then I realized how much I enjoy trying to understand other people,” she says. “My friends always say I’m the caretaker.”

While her friends have played an important role in lifting her spirits as she continues her journey fighting transverse myelitis and enduring months of unanswered questions, they are also a large part of what Calee has had to sacrifice this year.

Evidence of a once gregarious college student line Calee’s walls in picture frames holding cherished photos of her family and friends. But Calee now lives alone. She’s in need of a secluded place to regain her strength. The apartment is dimly lit and quiet– a cozy den to accommodate the 16 hours of sleep she must get every day.

“I’m up for two hours, sleep for six, up for two, sleep for six,” she says, a hint of frustration breaking through her otherwise composed, cheerful tone. “It’s a full-time job.” She pauses and glances back at the documents spread out in her lap, regaining steady conviction in her voice.

“But I have to do what I can to stay alive.”

Read part one here.