On to the Neurologist

The first visit to the neurologist was schedukled for late June and my insurance company called at some point wanting to know why I had been referred to a neurologist. To be frank, I had no idea. So I called the doctor.

"Why exactly do I need to see a neurologist?" I asked the nurse because getting in to see the doctor was more than a bit frustrating.

"To figure out what's wrong with your foot..." she replied.

Duh. I knew that. Okay, try again. "What is the diagnosis we are looking for?" God, I sound like an insurance company. Must be because the hubby was at that moment working for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

"Probable MS". She was matter of fact. I was crushed. It was like a life sentence only worse. I imagined all the possible scenarios and let's just say I was not impressed.

To be honest, I knew very little about the disease at that point but I was crushed. I called my husband at work. He did the initial research to tell me what it might mean and told me not to worry about it until we found out for sure.

Finally, we got to the actual day of the doctor's visit. It was miserable. Nerve conductivity tests are not excruitiatingly painful, but they aren't comfortable either. I ended up with small burn marks on my lower leg from the pins used to conduct the electricity.

I did a lot of heel to toe walking and some balance exercises and learned that I had once again been sent to a closed mouth doctor. I hate that! If you are about to tell me something devastating about my life, please at least talk to me about it.

Instead, at the end of the hour plus visit he pronounced that I did not have nerve damage and that I needed further tests, specifically an MRI of the brain. We would be looking for lesions, the easiest evidence that I did indeed have MS.

Now, I had just had an MRI of the spine and it wasn't cool. MRI's are loud and enclosed and I have always been more than a little claustrophobic. I mentioned this tot he nurse who was setting up the MRI. I should have kept my mouth shut.

The kind nurse offered to set up my MRI at an open MRI center instead of the hospital. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Two weeks later, when I had the MRI done, I didn't know why I hadn't just gone to the hospital. The so-called open MRI was almost an as enclosed as a standard MRI and the test was just as nerve-wracking.

But when the radiologist read the reports, it showed no evidence of lesions. Like that, I was dismissed back to the care of my regular doctor. The possibility of MS was denied and I didn't even have to go back to see the neurologist, until three years later. By the time I saw him again, I knew he had been wrong the first time, but he was the only neurologist available, so it was back to see him again.

I made some major mistakes in that first round of diagnostics. I accepted it when they told me that MS was not the cause for my symptoms, and did not push overly hard for them to find a real cause. Instead, the doctor told me to lose 30 pounds, consider learning tai chi or other stretching-based exercise, walk more and come in for pain meds and muscle relaxers when my back seized up too much.

I had to visit him twice over the next three eyars when my back hurt so much that I couldn't lift my right foot to get into and out of my car. I found I didn't like muscle relaxants as they made my head feel fuzzy and pain killers just put me to sleep, but I suffered through with my diagnosis of sciatica until August, 2004, when my husband and I were rear ended. the subsequent treatment for whiplash made me question a lot of the things that my doctor had preached including his insistence that I avoid chiropractors.