Emotional Support Sisters

My first appointment at the migraine clinic was a little surreal.  The doctor started out asking about me. He wanted to know what I liked and what I didn’t like. He wanted to know about my family. He wanted to know what made me tick and what my life goals were. After that he started to ask about symptoms and about potential injuries that could have caused symptoms when they started to get  worse. He first explained migraines were slow motion seizures , and that he treated them as seizures. He also said that the symptoms are really weird because the migraine,which starts in the hypothalamus, then radiates across nerves in the brain stem, which in turn causes all sorts of different symptoms that don’t necessarily look like a migraine. Then he did some testing. At that point he found that I had some neuropathy in my neck. He then ordered several different tests for me to do and then to come back in 2 weeks when the tests were done. The tests included x-rays of my neck, wearing a pulse oximeter and EKG monitor for 2 weeks, a test to measure how my brain is working, and a whole battery of blood work, including a 3-hour glucose test. 

Doing the glucose test. I thought I was going to die. By the end of the 3 hours I was so foggy-brained and I felt awful. I ate over 3,000 calories to try and feel better. Eventually I did, but I never want to do that again. 

At my second appointment, we went over the test results and came up with a treatment plan. 

 The test results for my blood work were interesting. I had to give myself a pat on the back because all of my nutritional blood work came back perfectly normal.. I have worked really hard to make sure that my nutrition was in a good spot because that was the only thing I could think of that was making me exhausted after eliminating everything else. So for it to come back normal made me feel accomplished. What came back weird was everything to do with my blood sugar. My A1C was in the pre-diabetic level. My insulin levels were elevated and my fasting blood sugar levels were slightly elevated. The 3-hour glucose was really telling. The first two draws after I took the glucose drink my blood sugars were at the right level but my insulin levels never changed. The third draw my blood sugars dropped to 54 mg/dl. If I dropped five more points I would have been at coma levels. 

The x-rays indicated that my top vertebrae on my spinal cord was tilted. Combine that with the neuropathy he was able to put together that there was scar tissue preventing movement in my top vertebrae and pinching a nerve. 

The pulse oximeter and EKG monitor came back with some telling results, also. During the night I was breathing perfectly, which is why whenever I did a sleep apnea test, I don’t have sleep apnea. During the day,however, my breathing was not normal. I would almost stop breathing. Some of the results were as low as four breaths per minute with oxygen saturation levels dropping to 78%. For reference, if you are in the hospital and your saturation levels drop below 93% they will put you on oxygen. An elite marathon running athlete resting respiration rate averages between 8 to 12 breaths per minute. Because I was not getting enough oxygen, my heart rate would skyrocket to 140 even though I was not exercising or doing anything strenuous.

The brain testing was also interesting. I had to do a lot of puzzles etc on a computer that were timed and progressively got harder. I actually did it while I had a really bad migraine, which probably wasn’t the best. But oh well. The results for that baffled the doctor. With how crazy my blood sugar was and how low my oxygen saturation level were, I should not Have been functioning as well as I was. If I had all of the information available to me to solve the puzzle I scored above average. But if I had to remember anything I scored below average. As we were discussing these scores he looked at me and said you don’t have Alzheimer’s. That had been a concern of mine because my memory is was crap, and my Grandpa died from Alzheimer’s.

It was so validating to actually find something wrong. I’ve been going to doctors for 12 years not feeling well, most of them saying I’m just a tired young mom. Or, once I was past the tired young mom stage, giving me weird syndromes that didn’t necessarily make sense to me. Some of them did, but not all of them. To actually know what was going on and why I felt so gross and tired was amazing. He provided me with hope for the first time in years. Just having hope that it could get better. Was like a shot of caffeine. I had energy again because I didn’t feel like I had a life sentence of exhaustion and fog.

Missy