Teen Loses Her Vision in Terrifying Medical Episode. 6 Year Later, She's Helping Others Work Through Trauma (Exclusive)

• Jay Walker noticed something was wrong on Thanksgiving 2018

• At first, the then 15-year-old thought it was food poisoning, but as the weeks went by and she tried different remedies to soothe her stomach, nothing worked, and she grew increasingly worried

• Eventually, she went to the emergency room, where doctors checked the pressure in her eyes and her life changed

Jay Walker noticed something was wrong on Thanksgiving 2018. At first, the then 15-year-old thought it was food poisoning, but as the weeks went by and she tried different remedies to soothe her stomach, nothing worked, and she grew increasingly worried.

Then, one day in early December of the same year, Walker, who was in high school at the time, remembers lying in bed after being awake all night, vomiting and dealing with diarrhea. She couldn’t focus on anything, whether it was doing her homework, watching TV or playing video games. Although something inside her kept saying, "You need to leave; something is wrong," she kept ignoring it, attributing it to her anxiety.

But around 3 p.m. that same day, Walker felt a surge of panic. She recalls feeling as though she had been slapped in the face. She immediately shot up, grabbed her blanket and stuffed animal, and walked downstairs to the living room, where her mom and sister were watching a movie.

"I looked at my mom and I said, 'Mom, we're going to the hospital,' " Walker tells PEOPLE exclusively. "It was not a question, it was not a consideration, it was a demand, like, 'You are taking me to the hospital or I will get there myself.' And she knew that. So she just said, 'All right.' "

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The family drove to the emergency room, where they checked in at 4:34 p.m. Not long after, doctors triaged Walker and placed her in a curtained-off section of a room, where she sat for four hours before receiving medical attention. For the first two hours, nothing happened. At one point, Walker recalls developing a bad headache. She wasn’t sure if it was from being severely dehydrated, but the nurse didn’t seem concerned.

While she was waiting, Walker remembers telling her sister that she needed to use the bathroom. They got up and went, where Walker ended up vomiting blood. Her sister noticed that Walker's hands were swollen, blotchy and pink. Just 16 months prior, Walker had experienced a similar episode of swelling, which doctors had dismissed as an allergic reaction. When they returned to the curtained-off area, Walker’s sister informed their mom, who immediately stood up and began searching for a doctor.

"Within minutes of her looking for help, the lights got really bright," Walker says. "I remember my head was pounding, and then I felt my teeth start to hurt. I always thought when traumatic things like that were to happen, time would slow down, and you'd be able to process it, but it happened so fast. I looked at my sister and I said, 'It's going to kill me this time,' and then I blacked out."

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From what Walker has been told, after she passed out, her face started swelling severely. She got a purple rash all the way across her temples and her forehead, and it started going down the bridge of her nose and across her cheeks. Her family brought in a nurse, who immediately decided to take her to the intensive care unit (ICU).

By the time Walker reached the ICU floor, she was four times the size she had been in the emergency room. Her face was black and purple, and her eyes started to swell, beginning with the left one. Not much later, an ophthalmologist was brought in. Although he seemed upbeat at first, after checking the pressure in Walker's eyes, he was alarmed; hers were nearly seven times a typical level.

Right away, she was rushed into orbital compartment surgery, an emergency procedure to relieve pressure in the eye socket. Throughout it all, Walker remained unconscious, but she does have little memories of the day that will pop up every so often.

"He literally ripped off his jacket and tie and sprinted out of the room to call an attending," Walker says she was told by her mom. "Then he came back in with a bag and said, 'Everybody needs to move. We need to release the pressures.'

"The funny part is that there wasn't anybody in the room who actually knew how to help him, except for my mom," Walker adds. "At the time, she was a surgical technologist, so she'd been involved in surgeries like that before. She literally looked at him, put on a pair of gloves, and said, 'I'm going to hold the clamp, and you're going to save her eyes.'

"They ended up starting with the left one, the one that was bulging," she continues. "And when they released the pressure, the right eye started to bulge. It was like whack-a-mole. The left eye went down, and the right eye went up. And I don’t mean it was just bulging out of my face — I’m pretty sure at one point my eyeballs were actually out of their sockets."

After the surgery, Walker remained in a coma for three days. When she woke up, doctors told her family that she would be completely blind within five days, and that it was unlikely her vision would ever return. (To this day, despite undergoing genetic testing and multiple appointments with the Mayo Clinic, Walker has yet to receive a real diagnosis.)

From there, the high schooler stayed in the hospital for a total of 16 days, which felt like years, working with social workers, doctors and others to figure out how she would adapt to her new life. Eventually, on Dec. 28, 2018, she was finally released from the hospital. She recalls feeling at the time that she was "ready to go."

"I was ready to be blind," Walker, now 21, tells PEOPLE. "I thought, 'I can do this.' "

However, once she got home, Walker quickly realized that transitioning back to her life wouldn't be as easy as she'd hoped. Funny enough, she says, while she could do "hard" things, like shaving her legs and doing crafts, the "small" things — like eating, showering or making her bed — were a challenge.

She recalls one specific incident when her mom had made her an egg, which wasn’t scrambled. She tried to eat it but couldn’t pick it up with the fork. Every time she tried, it just fell off. "I got so frustrated that I literally dropped the fork and just cried at the kitchen table," she says. "I was like, I can't even eat, and I think that was the first moment I realized this is going to be really hard."

In February 2019, Walker returned to high school, where she faced new social dynamics. Friendships changed, and she had to adjust to being a student at both her public school and the Kansas State School for the Blind, where she was learning rehabilitation techniques, including braille and the use of adaptive technology.

At that point, she'd only been using a cane for a week, so she relied on a guide to take her around.

"Going back to school, it was such a daunting task — not necessarily because I was scared I was going to get lost or that I wouldn't have friends, but because it was literally me accepting the fact that I was blind."

"When you're disabled, there's almost like this air around you," she adds. "People make you feel special. They give you special attention, they ask you weird questions. They don't make you responsible for certain things. They kind of let you off the hook a little bit easier. And that just happens. And I've had that through my experience."

Years passed, and Walker graduated high school and went on to attend the University of Central Missouri, where she's now a junior. However, despite moving forward, the emotional weight of accepting her blindness remained heavy, and she has struggled with the loss of her old dreams and ambitions. She had once aspired to become a doctor, drive a car, join a sorority and live a life like everyone else.

During her junior year of college, everything hit her.

"I know it sounds strange, but after five years, it hadn't really hit me that this was permanent. But when all you're doing is running and running and running, you never really have a chance to stop and think, 'Okay, what's actually going on right now?' "

"I literally just lost it because everything from the past five years — every struggle, every insecurity — flooded me all at once. And I had a breakdown. That was when I accepted the fact that I was blind. It took me five years to say, 'Okay, this is happening. I need to do something about this.' "

So, Walker turned to TikTok, an app she had heavily relied on due to its accessibility features, to post videos about her journey with her signature sense of humor. One day, she'd just gotten back from the gym and filmed herself sharing her story in her workout clothes, not thinking much of it. But then, she found that it had 10,000 likes, then suddenly, more than 2 million.

As her audience grew, she realized that, as people were responding to her and DMing her, it wasn’t just her who had gone through delayed grieving or experienced a traumatic incident. This sparked her interest in making videos about mental health, bipolar disorder, blindness and other serious topics.

"You are so strong," one person commented on her video.

"Love from a blind college student ❤️❤️❤️," someone else wrote.

Another person replied, "you are a captivating storyteller and brave as hell. your light shines so brightly through the way you speak, i was nearly brought to tears. it is impossible to imagine how hard this experience was."

"I get a lot of messages that say, 'I've been watching you since I went blind, and you’ve really helped me through the process,' " Walker says. "So whether it’s selfish or narcissistic, whatever it is, I thought, maybe this could help people. Maybe hearing how I went through the process and how I learned this perspective will help others cope with their own difficulties."

"For most people, it may take months to realize something’s changing. So, I’d say that it’s always worth the wait. Have patience and remind yourself that it’s not always going to be dark and gloomy. Blindness isn’t the thing making my life dark and gloomy. It’s my perspective on blindness. Have patience, and try to do more than just survive — live. Don’t just survive."

Since opening up about her story online, Walker has also written a memoir, which she's currently in the editing process for. While she continues to post on social media, right now, she also wants to focus on the simple things.

"It sounds funny, but I spent six years literally fist-fighting life," she says. "I was just trying to survive. And so, as a 21-year-old, all I want is to just sit with my boyfriend, be domestic, go to school, have a job and be happy with the family I create."

"The one thing I’ve always said is that it’s worth the wait — the grief, the pain, the hospitalizations, the diagnosis. There will eventually be a day where you wake up and feel different. And it could present itself in various ways. For me, it was just waking up and realizing, 'Something is different.' "

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