One day in March 2023, Kyle McMorrow of Brooklyn woke up at 5 a.m. with the worst neck pain he’s ever had.
“I thought I had slept on it wrong. I tried to massage it out with a massage gun, but nothing worked,” he tells TODAY.com.
He was 37 years old, healthy and active — he worked out in a gym, played basketball, biked outdoors, ran and hiked. It never crossed his mind that he could be having a . Despite the pain, he headed to his job in New York City, but he noticed some unusual symptoms.
“As I took the train to work, I was having a hard time walking in a straight line. It felt like there was a magnet on my hip pulling me to the left. I didn’t understand what was happening,” he says.
He also started feeling nauseous. When McMorrow arrived at work, he talked to his boss about his symptoms, and his boss told him he should see a doctor. McMorrow decided to see his primary care doctor.
While he was waiting for the train, he called his girlfriend, Ema Jimenez, who knew something was seriously wrong. “His speech was slurred. When I heard that, I thought it might be a stroke, but I didn’t tell him that,” she says.
“It seemed neurological to me. I had meningitis once, so I know what it feels like when your symptoms don’t really let up and you feel nauseous like that,” she says. She told him he needed to go to the hospital, and he took her advice.
McMorrow says, “When I got out of the train station, I still didn’t understand what was happening. I was loo.
