And the soap opera continues

October 21, 2007

Well, the rollercoaster ride is not over. It just took some unexpected turns.

Last week Linda, Clara, Ella, and I flew to Florida to attend my cousin’s wedding. He looked scared out of his mind when the ceremony began but he quickly recovered. His new bride and her family are charming.

The trip made us nervous. It has been a rough few weeks since I last wrote.

We are still screwing around for a definitive diagnosis. My neurologist is strongly hinting at a call of migraines call Basilary Migraines. These attacks occur in the brain stem which controls autonomous and reflex functions. They are most common in women, and not in all women. The classes that are most prone to these attacks are pubescent girls and menopausal women. Middle age men are usually not hit. However the symptoms seem to follow mine very closely. Vertigo, double-vision, weakness, headaches in the back of the head (although these attacks can occur without headaches), slurred speech, amnesia (don’t believe Hollywood. Normal amnesia is basically short-term memory loss), automatic behavior, ringing in the ears, extreme mood swings, anxiety, misinterpretation of what one sees, irregular body movement. Yup, that is a big check mark after each of these. The joke at home is we never know which Dale we will see today. Maybe today is Stroke-like Dale. Or Turrets-Dale (without the cursing…this IS a family show, after all), or Parkinson’s Dale, or Epileptic-Dale, or Normal-Dale, or Sleeping-Dale, or Paranoid-Dale. Never a dull moment.

Migraines usually have triggers. We have not figured mine out.

I had been placed on a very low dose of nortriptyline. This drug, traditionally used as an antidepressant, can in low dosages help prevent various migraine attacks. I had just started it about a week before the trip. And 2 days before the trip I ended up with a serious problem. I appeared to be a full-blown Parkinson’s patient. Extreme body shakes, loud, syncopated stuttering, head bobbing, nervous ticks…the works. What was strange was I actually did not feel that bad. I just looked like hell and scared the crap out of everyone. One colleague at work said that she could just feel the energy pour out of me into my surroundings. It was surreal. I had a difficult time speaking. By the end of the day I was exhausted just from the tremors. I had read and also spoke to someone at work that this could happen from the drug I was taking after about a week. The shakes should subside in a few days.

Linda and I fretted. What about Florida? We decided, what the hell. I worked 1/2 a day and we were scheduled for the red-eye into Tampa. We hit massive traffic on the way to the airport due to several wrecks. We basically made it to the gate as boarding began.

We made the decision to take a wheelchair along with us. At security we ran into some minor problems. TSA made me take out my CPAP (new regulations now require that since August). To make matters worse, the CPAP tested positive for nitrates (i.e., explosives). So everything went back through x-ray again. I had to get out of the chair and get patted down. They went over my wheelchair. Normally I would have taken that in stride. While I was pretty much symptom-free all day, I broke down in security. The shakes, the stuttering, the head-bob. Yup, I was loopy. And I stayed that way through a lot of the weekend. To make matters worse, the cabin pressure change on landing killed me and sent me into a full-blown vertigo attack. On the second flight things got worse. A woman behind me opened the luggage compartment above me and dropped my cane SMACK on my head, She felt terrible. Then in trying to get off of the plane I fell over backwards onto the seats and hurt my back on the armrest. Things were not starting off too well…