The whole seizure thing part 2.
Ok, picking up where I left off, the next stage was a plethora of doctor’s visits. I had to see an orthopaedist about my arm and a neurologist about my brain.
There is only one neurologist’s office in Ithaca, making getting an appointment non-trivial (at least if you want one on a short time scale). I therefore ended up going to Syracuse for the neurologist side of things. I wanted to see the neurologist sooner rather than later since I was not allowed to drive until after I’d been cleared by him/her.
The orthopaedist visit was pretty uneventful. The bad news was/is that dislocated shoulders take a very long time to heal. I don’t have my arm in a traditional sling, since the important joint to keep immobilized is the shoulder. Thus, I’m in one of these guys:
I’m even allowed to have my lower arm un-fastened much of the time, since the critical thing is that I don’t move my shoulder.
On the whole, this has been okay and the pain hasn’t been too bad; I was on vicodin for the first week or so, but since then have been coping with just ibuprofen. For the past few weeks it hasn’t been as much a severe pain as it has been persistent. Ibuprofen has only been somewhat effective and the main feature is a sort of low-level burning like the muscles in my upper arm are extremely sore and stiff (feeling vaguely like when the muscles are full of lactic acid?). It’s not really debilitating or anything, but it is very frustrating and very distracting. As a result of this I’ve been unable to get much of anything productive done recently. Hopefully things will be better after I see the orthopaedist again on Tuesday. Maybe I’ll be able to take my arm out of the sling and start some physical therapy, but overall the recovery time for an injury like this is on the order of six months to a year. Ugh.
On the neurology side, I saw a Doctor Smitta Kittur in Syracuse. Since there’s a university there, there are a host of doctors of all sorts of specialties, so it was pretty easy to get an appointment on short notice.
She did a basic neurological exam and ordered an EEG and an MRI. Both of those were mildly entertaining, although the EEG was definitely more exciting since they were attaching twenty-two electrodes to various parts of my head. I felt pretty weird sitting there, but all was well (apparently). The real challenge with having two appointments with the neurologist and two tests in Syracuse was in getting there. I had to get generous people to drive me there. This was made more difficult by the fact that my appointments were during the day when most people have exciting things like classes, work, and so on. So many thanks go out to Amy Long from gaming who drove me to both of the neurologist appointments, Amy Jaffe who came along for the EEG trip, and Jess Sailor who drove me up to my MRI test. She had the honor of being mistaken for my wife by the MRI tech (who said that I could just leave my things in the waiting room with my wife). Apparently we really do bicker like an old married couple 
Anyway, having had the second neurologist’s visit, I am now more or less cleared. I don’t have to be on any kind of anti-convulsants, so that’s good. And I’m allowed to drive again (which meant I got to visit Beth last weekend). This doesn’t really leave a good explanation of what caused the syncopal episode (or seizure) and so it’s not terribly satisfying. However, it’s nice to be more or less in the clear now.
There are still a couple of oddities that could warrant further investigation. The first is that on my neurological exams, I had one odd ‘feature’. One thing the doctor does is to run her hand in front of her face (quite close) and asks you to follow it with your eyes. At the very edges (as far to the left and right that I can move my eyes), my eyes do an odd jittering thing, where they skip back and then out again.
Between this and the fact that I feel like I have rather more frequent twitches than I would have thought reasonable, I’m still not quite out of the woods. Also, my white blood cell count was high (when they did tests at the ER) which could indicate an inflammation of the brain somewhere, which could in principle trigger a seizure. I’ll get another blood test before I see Dr. Kittur again, and will hopefully then be able to rule that out. Finally, there could be something cardiological playing into all of this, so I could/should try to go see a cardiologist for some tests.
I’m seeing the neurologist again in the middle of March, so hopefully at that point I’ll really be done with all this.
For now I’m really looking forward to getting my arm out of this silly shoulder immobilizer and be able to stretch it again. Maybe it will even stop hurting at some point so I can get some work done again.
