(If you are allowing children to read, you should probably stop that right now.)
So, I went to see another neurologist today. My original neurologist (Dr. M) sent me to see the second neurologist (Dr. F) because he couldn't figure out what was wrong, and this guy had an opening pretty quickly. Come to find out, that opening was for emergency need patients (sneaky, sneaky Dr. M! High five!) and this doctor was super confused as to why a fellow neuro doc sent me to him.
Side comment: If one more doctor looks at me and says "But why did they refer you to me?" I am going to throw their stethoscope across the room.
This guy got over his initial confusion and did his own workup, and WOULDN'T YOU KNOW WE HAVE SOME NEW FINDINGS??? I've got sensory loss from my knees down, people. It "may or may not come back." He took his little painful pin and stabbed me in my thigh, which hurt kind of like a tiny bitch (but I won't say that because that would be very not-Marine of me) and then he stabbed me in the knee...same stabby pain. Then he stabbed my calf. Or so he says. I wasn't really looking, but it certainly didn't feel like he stabbed me. It actually felt like my calf had been numbed in a bucket of ice water for half an hour before he stabbed me, because I barely felt anything. WHICH DOES NOT MAKE SENSE BECAUSE MY FEET AND LEGS STILL HURT LIKE A MOTHER F*ER SO HOW ARE THEY NUMB?!!! (The answer is peripheral neuropathy. Here is the Wikipedia page to give you the definition for anyone who wants to read up.)
Moving onto the part that makes me want to face-punch someone (don't worry, I am going to do a shit-ton of origami instead once I am done blogging about my woes.).....
This doc decides that my peripheral neuropathy might be caused by the fact that I am on Antabuse. You want to know why? Because he read an article like 3 decades ago and it "just popped up in the back of his brain" when he thought of a young woman with PN.
Can I just interrupt myself here and say that I Googled (Bing.com'd) that shit myself and found the study he was referring to from 1982 and it is an EXTREMELY rare side effect, and also, they weren't even sure if that was the cause of the girl's PN at all.
So, you know, let's just take B off of the med that ensures her sobriety and gives her the sense of security that she won't fuck up and jump head first off the wagon at the first sign of booze because 30 years ago some girl had similar symptoms and happened to be on the same medication. Awesome.
Also, because he is a doctor and obviously cannot put all of his eggs in the same basket, we are running a bunch of tests to make sure my husband isn't secretly poisoning me.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and all that.
Bah Humbug!
- B