I know...it's been a week.

Or more...I can't remember the last time I posted. And that's just really uncool, so, my apologies. I'll bring this blog up to speed then:

That life-sucking exhaustion kept up for days, and I had another one of those episodes early Tuesday morning. It was so sudden and intense it actually woke me up. At around 04h00 it seemed to dissapate but on the drive to work I felt it again. So I walked onto the jobsite (half of me totally numb mind you, and walking up the stairs like that is no fun) and told Devar I had to go see my doctor. He told me to just go, and I am grateful for that. No bullshit. I had called my hematologist's office about the episode Thursday and Dr. Kingsley had told me that if it happened again, just get down to the office ASAP so he could witness it and figure out what it was. So it's exactly what I did. By the time I got there I was wobbly, I was stuttering again, and the aphasia was pretty bad. (Heh...that's right, I learned a new word: when one uses the wrong word in place of the one he means to use.) I was coherent; Dr. Kingsley was testing me to see if I'd had another stroke, he kept asking me what common things were called, and I think he was sure I was having one until he noted I didn't have any weakness on one side. Numbness yes; weakness no. So he consulted a neurologist.

In the meantime I zoned out in their patient waiting area and I must have looked like I was in shock. His office shares space with a cancer treatment center, and a woman sat down next to me and said to her companion in Spanish, "Oh, she just found out!" Then they debated on whether or not to ask me, and finally the woman touched me on the shoulder and said, in English, "It's okay, I have lung cancer. It's not so bad. You'll be okay." And aside from the fact I couldn't form a sentence, I wasn't sure I wanted to tell her I didn't have cancer anyway; I sensed she felt good in comforting me.

Again the episode left pretty quickly, and I left to see Dr. Ginsburg, a neurologist. I had an electroencephalogram done, to test for seizures, and he told me that while I am positive for past transient ischemic attacks, he thinks that this episode and the one from that past Thursday are either a form of migraine or a form of temporal lobe epilepsy.

I'll be honest. As many years I worked in the healthcare field, I assumed migraines were headaches. I don't have headaches. I don't have any pain with these episodes. And I also don't twitch or anything, as one might expect with seizure activity. But he showed me books and all kinds of stuff talking about it and it was rather enlightening. So he put me on Topamax, since it treats both those disorders, plus has side effects of weight loss and scar reduction (yay!), and also because I've already been on Trileptal, Neurontin, Lamictal and Depakote, and my sister had a very unsavory experience with Klonopin. He said Topamax was a different class of medication. So far it hasn't given me any of the fatigue it promised, so I'm hopeful.

Anyway, yeah. That's been about it. I'm still on Devar's crew, still doing headboards and they changed our shift to begin an hour earlier (and I could hug someone for that). Things are mostly okay. I might even get back into paintball....oh, the joy!