Miracles: Guillain-Barré could not stop Maria Corona.

Maria Corona was preparing food at Red Lobster in Salinas on Aug. 6 when her hands went numb. “The next day, my left leg was hurting a lot,” she says. So her daughter, Myra Corona, drove Maria to the Emergency Room.

About three weeks earlier, Maria’s mother had died, and so the doctors assumed Maria was suffering from intense stress. They sent her home.

Then she got worse. By Aug. 10, Maria couldn’t move at all.

“I had no idea what was wrong, and I was scared because I didn’t know how to move anymore,” she says. “I asked God to help me.” She starts crying as she remembers. “I don’t know why this happened to me.”

Myra called her mother’s doctor, and he told the two to meet him at Natividad Medical Center, where he ran multiple tests on Maria. The two arrived at the hospital at 9am on Aug. 10. By 2am the following morning, a neurologist had news for Maria. She was ill with a disease she had never even heard of.

“He told me that I had Guillain-Barré, and that it was going to take a long, long time to recover.” Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS, pronounced ghee-yan bah-ray) is a rare disorder that inflames the peripheral nerves outside the brain and spinal cord. Its victims experience the rapid onset of weakness and paralysis, beginning with the arms and legs, and often moving to the breathing muscles and face. Some cases are mild; some patients are totally paralyzed. Most patients recover but there is no definite recovery time. Many require months of hospital treatment, and some remain wheelchair-bound for life.

The cause is unknown, although some cases occur shortly after a viral or bacterial infection, or after a vaccination. (Doctors believe that Maria contracted GBS from a vaccine she received in Mexico.)

In the US, GBS affects one to two people out of every 100,000. “The doctor told me I was number seven in all of California,” Maria remembers.

Luckily, Maria didn’t require a machine to help her breathe. Still, she spent a week in intensive care, and three more weeks at Natividad. On Oct. 6, she went home, still confined to a wheelchair and unable to hold a toothbrush in her hand.

“All I was thinking was, ‘When am I going to be able to move again?’” she recalls.

Today, Maria, who is 48 but looks about 10 years younger, sits in a wheelchair with her daughter, Myra, nearby. Maria comes to Natividad’s rehabilitation unit twice a week for therapy, where therapists help her gain strength and stability. At first, moving required two people to carry Maria from place to place, and the pain, she says, was intense. Her hypersensitive nerves throbbed from the slightest touch—a human hand, or running water.

Maria can walk now with the help of a walker—at home she rarely even uses a wheelchair—and can feed herself, and brush her own hair. She has had to train her muscles to relearn every basic function. 

Claudia Cameron and Loujeanne Aguon, Maria’s physical and occupational therapists, say they are working to help Maria regain motion in her hands, “So she can make us homemade tortillas,” Cameron jokes.

“Sí, and the nurses upstairs want tamales,” Maria says.

“She used to cook, nonstop,” says Myra. “Traditional dishes: tamales, enchilada, posole.”

A couple of days later, Myra calls me. Her mother forgot to tell me several things. “She says she is grateful for all of the people who prayed for her. She says she’s grateful for us, her daughters, because we would take turns spending every night with her at the hospital.

“And she says that when she was so desperate from the pain, at some points, she would think, ‘I’m suffering so much, what’s the point of being around?’ And then, she would bring herself back to reality. ‘If God has me here, it must be for a reason.’”