Lovely Wife Sara has been very sick.
Some people know and some don't, but that's the reason that I've been kinda weirder than usual for the past few months, and why e-mails and phone calls and so on have been lower on my list than usual. We hadn't told many people until now because we wanted to know more before talking.
It started at the very beginning of May with some numbness and tingling in her extremities and quickly progressed to fatigue, occasional real pain in her arms and legs, a low-grade fever, difficulty climbing stairs or doing prolonged physical activities. She has said that her knees "feel like they're made of air" and sometimes has bouts of dizziness that have kept her laying on the couch for entire evenings until it was time for bed.
Some days she'll be fine until, seemingly out of nowhere, one of her legs will get what feel like tiny electric shocks, or one of her arms will become so numb/painful that she can barely use it to lift things.
The symptoms have been slowly getting worse over the seven or eight weeks that this has been going on.
We've kept it quiet from most people, as we didn't want people worrying until we knew more.
She had a neurologist appointment in Chicago today, she had a back-neck-brain MRI last week, and she's had three blood panels done.
I picked today to tell people because two of the worst have officially been ruled out.
The neurologist today was finally able to firmly state that she does not have Multiple Sclerosis or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, aka Lou Gherig's Disease.
This is the best news we've had since this ordeal began.
Other things that have been ruled out include Lyme Disease, lupus, and a host of other disorders.
Her MRI did show some lesions in the back of her brain, but the neurologist concluded that they were older than her current condition and could possibly have resulted from a series of tiny strokes or some other source. In any event, they're not related to what she has now.
She has a transesophageal echocardiogram on Wednesday morning (they stick a tube down her throat and do an EKG from the inside so they can check all of her arteries, et cetera) and she has an appointment scheduled with a rheumatologist.
She is going to have another MRI done, this one with higher detail on one portion of her spine, as the neurologist. thinks that there may or may not be something there. Apparently it's hard to tell on a general MRI, but one that focuses on that spot will provide more info. If it is something there it seems to be about where a defect that would affect her legs would be located.
So that's where we are right now. The more things are ruled out the better this gets, as they tend to test for the worst things first.
We're not out of the woods yet--indeed, we don't even know where the trail is--but at least she's bypassed most of the truly bad things.
Cross your fingers, think good thoughts, pray, whatever your bag is, if you would.
She's still feeling pretty bad, and there's still a lot more stuff for them to check her for, but...
Yeah. No MS and no ALS...that's the best news we've had since the beginning of May.
Love all of you,
benjamin
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