Petty Officer Second Class Marcus Bivens stood before a panel of U.S. Navy officers, hands cuffed behind his back, facing charges of an unauthorized absence.

For his first fifteen years of service, Bivens had been considered a “squared-away sailor”—orderly, competent, conscientious. A sailor officers could rely on. But he had been missing work lately, sometimes for weeks at a time, and now he was standing in front of an ad hoc disciplinary tribunal investigating his rapid and seemingly inexplicable decline in job performance. Bivens could no longer physically complete his work tasks, even though it was an administrative job.

Several weeks prior, Bivens was driving home on I-15 from the Coronado naval base in San Diego when his eyesight suddenly went double. “It was terrifying,” he recalls. “I literally drove home with one eye closed.” Bivens made it to his house safely but immediately collapsed into bed, clothes still on, and slept for eleven hours. When he woke up, the double vision was worse.

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He went to the hospital, where he was subjected to a battery of tests. Doctors examined his eyes, his ear canal, his blood pressure. He was administered an EKG and had blood drawn. All the test results were normal, flummoxing a team of ophthalmologists and neurologists. “Every doctor took out their phone and Googled my symptoms, trying to figure out what was going on with me,” Bivens says. He was eventually diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, a rare neuromuscular disorder that typically affects women between the ages of twenty and thirty.

Bivens’s condition worsened over the next four months. He suffered tremors, sensitivity to light, aches throughout his body, and twitchy eyes. He slept just three to five hours a night. A self-described gym rat, Bivens lost his strength; he couldn’t do a single push-up. Doctors performed MRIs and MRAs and conducted more blood work. They wondered if Bivens had lesions on his brain. They prescribed him Ambien, Zoloft, Xanax, and Cafergot, a caffeine stimulant used to treat headaches. He was given an eye patch to alleviate the double vision. None of the tests revealed any abnormalities, and none of the doctors he saw could give him a satisfactory explanation for his bizarre array of symptoms.

At his lowest point, Bivens suffered intrusive thoughts. A disembodied voice whispered to him, “You’re gonna die.” He would hide in his closet, away from any overwhelming stimuli, praying for God to spare him. “It was hell on earth,” he says.