Teen returns from cruise with ‘terrifying’ mystery illness that’s left her permanently blind

[WARNING: Images may be graphic]

Doctors are trying to solve the mystery of a Missouri teenage girl who went on a cruise with her family and ended up with a still-undiagnosed illness that caused her to go blind.

Last summer, Jordyn Walker developed stomach pain and bloody stools after she came back from a cruise, WDAF reports. “It just went haywire from there. Everything started swelling,” Walker said.

Doctors ran a series of tests and eventually sent her home with a diagnosis of a sinus infection. But Walker, 15, ended up losing her sense of taste and smell, and began seeing several specialists who ran more tests. “Everything came back normal,” said Jordyn’s mom Kendyll Walker said.

Jordyn began to get better and her family was told that it was a “one in a million” incident that probably would never happen again. But two weeks before Christmas, her illness came back — and it was worse than before. “My whole face just turned purple and bruised and giant with blood,” she said.

“It was terrifying to watch it happen all over again and knowing that we couldn’t do anything about it,” Kendyll told WDAF. Jordyn went to the emergency room at the University of Kansas Hospital, and ended up in pediatric intensive care. She was hospitalized for 16 days and underwent more tests, took medications, and had two surgeries to reduce swelling in her eyes, but doctors still don’t know what happened.

“There’s no answers. There’s nothing they could do,” Kendyll said. Jordyn now is permanently blind from her illness. “She won’t get a chance to drive,” Kendyll said. “Or see her sisters get married like she wants so much.” Still, Jordyn says she’s determined to be positive about the experience. “I’m not going to let this stop me,” she said.

There’s no obvious answer for what could have caused Jordyn’s illness, infectious disease expert Amesh A. Adalja, MD, senior scholar at the John’s Hopkins Center for Health Security, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “It’s also possible that it’s not caused by one single disease,” he says. However, he adds, there are “systemic infectious diseases that can spread to the eye” like a bacterial or fungal infection that can cause endophthalmitis, an inflammation of the inside of the eye. “It’s possible that she had a bacterial infection that caused the initial GI symptoms and that spread systemically to her eye,” Adalja says. “But it also could have been an autoimmune process or something entirely different.”

While Jordyn’s story is terrifying, Adalja says the average person shouldn’t be worried about experiencing this. “The fact that this defies explanation shows how rare it is and how low of a threat it is to the general public,” he says. “Norovirus and influenza are the biggest things you need to worry about on cruises, not mysterious illnesses that make people go blind and lose their taste.”

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