Taylor's Story

My name is Taylor Chee and I would like to share my journey in discovering my diagnosis of Moyamoya disease. Towards the end of my second semester at UNLV I was getting bad migraines. There was this one day I had a migraine while taking the trash out and while walking back my vision blacked out and I ran into the wall head first. I did not think anything of this incident except for I might be "tired." When I came home (mid May), I helped at a UNLV freshman orientation held down here in Hawai'i. The orientation was from 8 am till 3 pm and I left early as I was not feeling good. After speaking with my pediatrician I was advised to take aleve and sleep in a dark room. After waking from a three hour nap I woke up feeling better. The next couple of days I would soon come to realize I was losing my peripheral vision. On June 4, 2014, waking up not being able to see on the sides of my head was one of the scariest things I have ever been through. Seeing my eye doctor confirmed that I could only see like "tunnel vision." I would later receive an MRI that would show I had a stroke in my occipital lobe. The occipital lobe controls vision. The stroke was on the right hemisphere of my brain which then explains the loss of vision in my left eye. After taking two MRIs, two MRAs, an echocardiogram, and two cerebral angiograms it was confirmed that I had two more strokes on the right hemisphere of my brain. The two strokes were mini strokes also called TIAs or transient ischemic attacks. I know it seems crazy, but what it all boils down to is that I was diagnosed with Moyamoya disease. Please read the following pages to find out more about moyamoya.