Showing posts with label Doctors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Doctors. Show all posts
Monday, July 21, 2008
And a Little Something From Children Around the Nation ;)
Study: Most Children Strongly Opposed To Children�s Healthcare
Is this the kind of thing only those of us whose children have had more than their fair share of medical care will find funny?!
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Tears of Recognition
I saw a seizure specialist for the first time today. It was a fiasco getting there. The hospital was completely disorganized, and the right hand did not know what the left was doing. I was sent to three different locations (in two different buildings)-- and had an inquiry by my name placed in two different computers by two different hospital staff people-- before finally being sent to the correct location for the seizure clinic.
The clinic is part of Harvard Medical School. For a good portion of my young adulthood, I wanted to attend Harvard Medical School. Life meanwhile took another direction. It was odd now to be driving past the school as a patient, and to have (presumably) one of its students (a resident perhaps?) conduct my patient interview and physical exam.
After finishing the interview and the exam, this doctor-- who I will call the "interview doctor"-- left the room, and he came back about ten or fifteen minutes later with the doctor to whom I'd originally been referred, who I will call the "recommendations doctor." She made the recommendations for next steps.
Basically, there are two things the "recommendations doctor" would like to do, to get a better understanding of what is happening in my brain. First, she would like to send me home with a portable EEG unit that I will keep on for 48 hours. During this time, it will take intermittent recordings. G. can also turn it on to do a recording if she feels I am spacing out. This provides a panaromic view of the electrical activity in my brain. The EEG I had done a while back was only a snapshot, and although it came back abnormal, provides little information.
The other thing the "recommendations doctor" would like to do is a high resolution MRI. Though the MRI I recently had been done was with contrast dye, giving us a good amount of information, the high resolution MRI will give us even more information.
The "recommendations doctor" explained to me that she is guessing I am having seizures that are impacting a large part of my brain, or indeed the whole thing. My symptoms would be more localized if the seizures were more localized.
When she first came into the room, the "recommendations doctor" asked me some clarifying timeline questions. Since my memory has been impacted in the course of my symptoms, the timeline had been difficult for me in the first place. But basically what I explained to the "interview doctor" was that I don't remember being especially symptomatic until maybe about five years ago. It has gotten slowly but progressively worse since then, and only within the last year or year and and a half was it bad enough that G. was alarmed to the point of forcing my hand so that I would see a doctor.
The clarifying questions were interesting. The "recommendations doctor" was able to use certain periods of time (for example, classes I took in high school) to help me create a better timeline. It was during that conversation when I remembered some experiences in school from early childhood. They may have been early symptoms. Tears began streaming down my face as the memories poured in. For years, those memories were markers of low academic self-esteem. Suddenly, those memories were also transformed into potential markers of a seizure disorder.
I was overcome by the need to apologize to the doctors for my tears. I felt so silly, sitting there in the clinic crying as I remembered little hardships about being a young student. The "recommendations doctor" let me know it was okay to cry. She said, "It seems to me we get a lot of tears around here. I think they are tears of recognition." Indeed.
She said that the seizures can go unnoticed for years and years even if they occur for say, as long as 30 or 45 seconds. She said she felt like intelligence could make up for large chunks of missing time. The brain just does double-time. I guess she was saying I am smart ;-). But this gets challenging as we get older, she explained, because our brains end up doing more multi-tasking as we balance our jobs and our families, and so forth. When we are younger and more focused on something like school, we have more reserves for a brain doing double duty. I don't have that luxury now, which may be why things are progressing and I was finally pushed to see a neurologist. Apparently, this isn't rare.
I had been thinking about my case as a "new(ish) onset" of seizures. Hmmm.
What an interesting day it has been.
The clinic is part of Harvard Medical School. For a good portion of my young adulthood, I wanted to attend Harvard Medical School. Life meanwhile took another direction. It was odd now to be driving past the school as a patient, and to have (presumably) one of its students (a resident perhaps?) conduct my patient interview and physical exam.
After finishing the interview and the exam, this doctor-- who I will call the "interview doctor"-- left the room, and he came back about ten or fifteen minutes later with the doctor to whom I'd originally been referred, who I will call the "recommendations doctor." She made the recommendations for next steps.
Basically, there are two things the "recommendations doctor" would like to do, to get a better understanding of what is happening in my brain. First, she would like to send me home with a portable EEG unit that I will keep on for 48 hours. During this time, it will take intermittent recordings. G. can also turn it on to do a recording if she feels I am spacing out. This provides a panaromic view of the electrical activity in my brain. The EEG I had done a while back was only a snapshot, and although it came back abnormal, provides little information.
The other thing the "recommendations doctor" would like to do is a high resolution MRI. Though the MRI I recently had been done was with contrast dye, giving us a good amount of information, the high resolution MRI will give us even more information.
The "recommendations doctor" explained to me that she is guessing I am having seizures that are impacting a large part of my brain, or indeed the whole thing. My symptoms would be more localized if the seizures were more localized.
When she first came into the room, the "recommendations doctor" asked me some clarifying timeline questions. Since my memory has been impacted in the course of my symptoms, the timeline had been difficult for me in the first place. But basically what I explained to the "interview doctor" was that I don't remember being especially symptomatic until maybe about five years ago. It has gotten slowly but progressively worse since then, and only within the last year or year and and a half was it bad enough that G. was alarmed to the point of forcing my hand so that I would see a doctor.
The clarifying questions were interesting. The "recommendations doctor" was able to use certain periods of time (for example, classes I took in high school) to help me create a better timeline. It was during that conversation when I remembered some experiences in school from early childhood. They may have been early symptoms. Tears began streaming down my face as the memories poured in. For years, those memories were markers of low academic self-esteem. Suddenly, those memories were also transformed into potential markers of a seizure disorder.
I was overcome by the need to apologize to the doctors for my tears. I felt so silly, sitting there in the clinic crying as I remembered little hardships about being a young student. The "recommendations doctor" let me know it was okay to cry. She said, "It seems to me we get a lot of tears around here. I think they are tears of recognition." Indeed.
She said that the seizures can go unnoticed for years and years even if they occur for say, as long as 30 or 45 seconds. She said she felt like intelligence could make up for large chunks of missing time. The brain just does double-time. I guess she was saying I am smart ;-). But this gets challenging as we get older, she explained, because our brains end up doing more multi-tasking as we balance our jobs and our families, and so forth. When we are younger and more focused on something like school, we have more reserves for a brain doing double duty. I don't have that luxury now, which may be why things are progressing and I was finally pushed to see a neurologist. Apparently, this isn't rare.
I had been thinking about my case as a "new(ish) onset" of seizures. Hmmm.
What an interesting day it has been.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Why a Guy Named Kurt Tyson Should Start Apologizing
(child injecting insulin)Several months ago, I stumbled upon this video on raw food diets: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtvFpF-3B5Q&feature=related
I originally found it on http://www.naturallivingmarket.com/rawlifestyle.html, but it seems to have been taken down (??).
A little less than halfway through the video, a guy name Kurt Tyson, who is narrating, says "Hi my name is Kurt Tyson, and I was diagnosed with type I diabetes. I was chosen out of hundreds of applicants to be one of six people to participate in a unique opportunity. For thirty days, we ate nothing but raw, live foods, and took supplements under the direction of Dr. Gabriel Cousins here at the Tree of Life. Since then I have returned to the real world, and I am excited to say that I have been diabetes free for over a year and a half now. Currently, I am attending Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine, where I am studying to become a naturopathic doctor because I want to help people live healthier lifestyles."
Here is why you should be disturbed by that statement, and why Kurt Tyson should start apologizing:
Type I diabetes is not the same as type II.
Type I diabetes occurs when your pancreas does not have the ability to produce any insulin. The islet cells in the pancreas are permanently destroyed in the pathological process of type I. This can't be cured, at least not yet, and there is no diet to save you from a type I diagnosis.
If you have type I, you have to take insulin via injection or insulin pump in order to live.
It is NOT at all like type II, in which the body just has reduced ability to use the insulin it produces (or produces less of it)...in which case I could certainly see that a raw food diet (which would significantly reduce fat and carbohydrate consumption) "making a type II better."
This video looks like a pretty big production. It is hard to imagine that the guy could have simply misspoke. There seem to be two plausible possibilities here:
1. This guy was either misdiagnosed with type I, or
2. He is misleading the audience (I noticed he said, "I was diagnosed with type I diabetes" rather than "I had type I diabetes.")
Either way, this claim destroys any shred of credibility in the video. This type of misinformation can make people dangerously ill. It can KILL people. Worse yet, on the video Mr. Tyson says he is studying to become a naturopathic doctor. Really??!! Would you want this guy as your doctor, naturopathic or not...this man who can't distinguish between two distinctly different medical conditions that happen to share part of a name, this man who purports a cure to an incurable condition?!?
You know who really ought to be concerned is the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine. This is not good for their credibility, and if they are letting this guy go on believing this stuff, they are promoting irresponsible "medicine."
I have seen someone make himself very ill trying to treat type I diabetes through herbal treatment. This smacks of a new version of the same thing.
Let's hear some apologizing Mr. Tyson. Please. Or if you have misunderstood the condition until now, would you please make a public correction of the dangerous misinformation you spread?
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Last of personal posts for a while:
I am back from a busy month, and I am getting ready to post again. I'll be returning to opinions, politics, religion, medical ethics, and that sort of thing with my next post, so this will be my last personal post for a while.
Just to tie up some loose ends:
1. We finally SOLD the house! Someone got a sweet deal on it, but now we can move on. In this market, we're lucky to have sold at all.
2. I am still undergoing the necessary neurological testing. I have an appointment on Friday at which I hope to finally have some answers.
3. For those who haven't heard our very sad news: our younger dog, B. died on Valentines Day. He was six years old. It was awful. His leash somehow wasn't fully clipped onto his harness and it snapped off and he went running. M. was frantic and kept calling and calling him. We tried to stay calm, but he wouldn't come back home so we decided we had to wait for him to come back on his own. B. has always been one to run farther and faster if someone is after him, and we didn't want to chase him off. He was hit by a car 45 minutes later. He lived for a short while, but by the time we spotted the police car out at the main road and I got over there, he was dead. It is sooooooo sad, and we all miss him like crazy (except maybe K. who at least seems unphased).
4. I do hope to post about New Orleans within the next week or two. Thanks a million to those who supported the trip. You were all so generous!
Just to tie up some loose ends:
1. We finally SOLD the house! Someone got a sweet deal on it, but now we can move on. In this market, we're lucky to have sold at all.
2. I am still undergoing the necessary neurological testing. I have an appointment on Friday at which I hope to finally have some answers.
3. For those who haven't heard our very sad news: our younger dog, B. died on Valentines Day. He was six years old. It was awful. His leash somehow wasn't fully clipped onto his harness and it snapped off and he went running. M. was frantic and kept calling and calling him. We tried to stay calm, but he wouldn't come back home so we decided we had to wait for him to come back on his own. B. has always been one to run farther and faster if someone is after him, and we didn't want to chase him off. He was hit by a car 45 minutes later. He lived for a short while, but by the time we spotted the police car out at the main road and I got over there, he was dead. It is sooooooo sad, and we all miss him like crazy (except maybe K. who at least seems unphased).
4. I do hope to post about New Orleans within the next week or two. Thanks a million to those who supported the trip. You were all so generous!
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Another Break For Personal News...
I don't intend this to be a diary style blog, but I have some interesting news.
1. Our house is under contract again. The first inspection is Thursday. Keep your fingers crossed for us.
2. I leave for New Orleans also on Thursday. Gah! So much still to do.
3. I received some interesting medical news Monday. I had gone to see a neurologist after G. begged and pleaded. My memory and clarity of thought has become very poor in the last year. The neurologist first gave me a very encouraging prediction. She looked at my throat, noted that it is especially small, and suggested that sleep apnea might be causing not only my neurological symptoms, but also my longtime chronic fatigue. This made me so super duper excited because sleep apnea is treatable with oxygen (read: no side effects other than having to sleep with equipment, a relatively common and doable condition, etc.).
I went and had my sleep study and have been eagerly awaiting my order of oxygen. But the sleep study didn't come back indicating sleep apnea. Instead, it actually brought up some other concerns. I haven't spoken with the neurologist in person yet, but given the little bit that the nurse said and the testing the neurologist has ordered (to happen immediately...they wanted it done this week, but I am going to do it as soon as I get back from New Orleans), it seems she is concerned I am having seizures. If I am having seizures, the questions to me seem to be, what is the cause and what is the treatment?
I am feeling a mixture of being scared and sad, but mostly, excited and eager to have some answers. I hope this isn't a false lead only in that I really want to know what is going on.
1. Our house is under contract again. The first inspection is Thursday. Keep your fingers crossed for us.
2. I leave for New Orleans also on Thursday. Gah! So much still to do.
3. I received some interesting medical news Monday. I had gone to see a neurologist after G. begged and pleaded. My memory and clarity of thought has become very poor in the last year. The neurologist first gave me a very encouraging prediction. She looked at my throat, noted that it is especially small, and suggested that sleep apnea might be causing not only my neurological symptoms, but also my longtime chronic fatigue. This made me so super duper excited because sleep apnea is treatable with oxygen (read: no side effects other than having to sleep with equipment, a relatively common and doable condition, etc.).
I went and had my sleep study and have been eagerly awaiting my order of oxygen. But the sleep study didn't come back indicating sleep apnea. Instead, it actually brought up some other concerns. I haven't spoken with the neurologist in person yet, but given the little bit that the nurse said and the testing the neurologist has ordered (to happen immediately...they wanted it done this week, but I am going to do it as soon as I get back from New Orleans), it seems she is concerned I am having seizures. If I am having seizures, the questions to me seem to be, what is the cause and what is the treatment?
I am feeling a mixture of being scared and sad, but mostly, excited and eager to have some answers. I hope this isn't a false lead only in that I really want to know what is going on.
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