My goodness, this is a long one! It’s been one and a half hours since this EEG was scheduled to start. This is the fourth time he’s had one and still we wonder why the seizures keep coming.
In the five and a half years I was a caregiver for Mike we had many unanswered questions. As a patient or caregiver, that can be very frustrating. Mike had a few diagnoses that the doctors were clear on and some that they weren’t. It was a very complicated case. I was never clear on the reason for the esophageal stricture. I’m not sure if the doctors were. I remember mentioning to the rheumatologist that I wasn’t sure of his auto-immune diagnosis, and he said he was positive it was correct but there may be something else.
The auto-immune disease was a rule-out diagnosis. In other words, when they don’t have a test for a specific disease, they rule out others and then fit the symptoms to a disease. I questioned this diagnosis because the doctor who made it seemed pretty pleased about finding a rare disease. Then he found someone else with it a few months later. I felt like the stricture in Mike’s esophagus was from the auto-immune disease, but the doctors were not clear on that.
I’ve had similar experiences with my horses. Grandpa gave me a horse named Reed Man when I was nine years old. When I was a senior in high school, he started having some riding issues that were caused by soreness in his feet. We treated that with medicine and some very involved shoeing. Later I found that with proper hoof care he was sound.
Then he got really sick. I took him to the vet, and they didn’t know what was wrong. They gave him supportive treatment while they sent tests to the K-State Veterinary Teaching Hospital. They called one morning and said he had neurological damage and would have to be put down. I was heartbroken. I wanted to know what happened, so they did an autopsy again we waited for results from K-State. They didn’t ever figure out what caused his disease. It was very frustrating. I’ve had this happen so many times with horses that I’ve stopped having it done. It’s not worth the money and heartbreak all over again.
Back to the reason for sitting in the waiting room at KU Med Center – the fourth EEG. It’s even more frustrating when it’s a person. It can take a long time – it’s been 10 months since the first seizure. We’d like some answers. The reality is that doctors can’t always give us definitive answers. They are not omniscient after all. And sometimes you may have the answer inside you. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t seek medical advice only that you listen to your body – your knowing and let the doctors help.
If you’d like to explore how the horses can help you find answers that are hiding within connect with me here.
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