16 September 2012:
Seeing single fairly consistency.
13 September 2012:
12 September 2012:
Took a crack at
socializing in the evening after attending a meeting for work. The
meeting was touch due to vision issues but it felt good to participate
in a good discussion.
4 September 2012:
Update From Lisa.
Good signs during physical therapy. Walking really well and good
balance, relatively speaking. Vision is still double but learning to
compensate for it. Everyone is still saying that these issues will most
likely decrease or completely go away.
Received the
results from the MRI. Doctors noted that I have a cavernous malformation, which is a small
cluster of thin-walled blood vessels that have the tendency to
hemorrhage. This is a birth defect and does tend to run in families. There seems to be a lot of information
on the Internet. There is surgery that can be done that can reduce the
likelihood of hemorrhaging. This isn’t performed here so the
neurologist is sending records to Stanford University. They typically don’t do
surgery after the first hemorrhage of this kind.
ITP is the other
complicating factor (low platelets). Been
treated for that last two years with no significant improvement they
need to evaluate the entire situation. So with that said I don’t really
know the long term plan yet. The short term plan is to get and keep platelets up. They just started another treatment as an
inpatient, a medication called Rituximab. This will suppress the immune
system and the hope is that it will allow platelets to build long
enough so that they can remove his spleen. The spleen is the organ that
destroys the platelets marked for destruction. This
only has a 50% success rate.
It seems the doctors can only deal
with the symptoms because there is little understood about what is
causing the immune system to destroy the good platelets. I’m hoping
this latest treatment will have a positive impact but it seems they are
determined to remove the spleen regardless.
2 September 2012:
ICU Day
Taken to get MRI of head. First time for that. I requested Pink Floyd music and got Bruce Springsteen instead. Holding still with a rack over my face wasn't too bad after the music started.
1 September 2012:
Emergency Room.
Felt odd at home and hung
out in bed most of the day feeling dizzy, or as if I was clouded by
drugs. When the headache moved around in my head and numbness started
to appear at the back of my right leg, it seemed time to call the
doctor. He urged me to get to the emergency room and so we went.
Emergency
room was full. I wrote on the triage sheet that I had bleeding in my
brain and I got to the front of the line. My doctor knew I needed
platelets, but it did take awhile to get to that. I had a CT Scan which
verified the bleed in the brain and suggested that I had a vein problem
in my brain that led to the bleeding. Not much information flowed
during this visit.
Eventually, I was moved to the ICU
with Lisa. Late that night I fell asleep and woke up after awhile to
discover my right body was numb and my vision was now double vision.
Their plan is to get me to a MRI the next morning.
