to recap

So to recap what has been happening with me in the last few months. Our little Danica was born on March 5th and for my last trimester I had been feeling pretty lousy. I had been used to having migraines for my 1st trimesters, but this was the 1st time I had them in my last trimester and the intensity and frequency was awful. I was getting a migraine up to 3 times a week. I was also getting them while I was sleeping, which was a real first. It's a terrible feeling to wake up from the feeling that your head is going to explode. After Danica was born I got a bit of a break for a few months and then went right back into the migraines again. Around the end July, on top of the migraines, I started to have a very heavy feeling in my head. That's the point where I figured it was time to get things checked out. Unfortunately, my family doctors at the time was absolutely terrible. He really should retire as he couldn't be bothered to do his job anymore. The response I got from him was to wait another month and if I was still getting migraines he'd put me on medication. That's the point I figured I needed a new doctor. I didn't really see any huge urgency at the time so I just scheduled a "meet and greet" for myself and the girls and the soonest they could get me in for that was the beginning of October (this was August when I made the appointment). Over the coarse of this time my symptoms started to get worse. First I started to get a "whooshing" sound in my ears and couldn't turn my head to the far right or left. Then I noticed that I was having a hard time focusing to read my girls bedtime stories. The last symptom that started to worry me a little was the fact that my entire left side of my face including my tongue and lips began to get numb and I lost the sense of taste on my left side of my mouth as well.

My appointment with the doctor turned out that they didn't schedule enough time for the doctor to see me and all 3 of our girls so I had to make an appointment for the week later...grrr. When I did get my appointment the doctor was great. She did a lot of tests and took my blood pressure and sent me for a battery of blood tests as well as and ECG. I went home convinced that the blood tests would show some issues with my hormones and figured I likely had a thyroid issue and the fact I was breastfeeding made it worst. I was wrong as all the tests came back negative. That week after my appointment I woke up very early 1 morning feeling with such and intense pain in my head (not like a migraine, but equally painful) and such bad double vision that I was actually worried that I would need to call an ambulance if it got any worse. The added stress was that Jeff was out of town and had been for the past 2 weeks and had another 6 weeks to go. That morning when the girls got up, I actually reviewed with Sidney that she knew how to call 911 just in case I did end up blacking out. Thankfully she did and I reviewed that with her a couple more times in the next week as I had another episode like the 1st. That morning I called my doctor to come in that day. I told her that I was getting nervous to be alone since I was worried about blacking out. She ordered a CT scan. I got my scan 2 weeks later and when I showed up at the hospital (which I love Cobourg hospital) the doctor doing my scan said that since my family doctor wanted to have my pituitary gland checked, he wanted to schedule me for an MRI as this gland is hard to see with a CT scan. They still did the CT scan, but I had to come back the next day for my MRI (I didn't know at the time but I was very lucky to have an MRI so quickly).

The weekend after my scans I went out for my friend Lisa's birthday to a nice restaurant in Picton. On the way home after dinner when I was telling Lisa and Chris how I had been feeling Chris had mentioned that he got the whooshing in his ears when he was dehydrated. I figured especially since I was breastfeeding still this could be very possibly a factor. That next week I tried to drink as much as I could and I think it did make me feel a little better. I thought it would take some time to build up my fluid amount so give it a couple more weeks and I thought I might have this things solved. Unfortunately it was not to be so easy.

That following Friday I got a call from my doctor's office informing me that although my CT scan showed nothing, my MRI showed a 2 cm tumour in my inner ear. The Doctor told me it was calls a vestibular Schwannoma. I had to struggle to keep the doc on the phone for even 5 minutes to try get an information out of him. He basically said it would not spread to the rest of my body and that I would need to come into see my family doctor the following Monday. I was a little gobsmacked and couldn't believe what I had just heard. I was thankful that all 3 of our girls were sleeping so I could head downstairs to do some quick research on the computer as to what this thing was. I quickly discovered that if treated properly it was not life threatening...good, but it was likely going to take my hearing from my left ear...not so good but not the end of the world. My next step was to send an e-mail to Jeff in Cyprus. Being conscience that my husband has a tendency to worry about my health (and understandable why) I decided to send him links to info sites about this tumour in my head in the hope it might put his mind a little at ease. It didn't take more then 20 minutes and I got a call from him. He hadn't looked at the links and was a little freaking out. We talked about what was going on and I asked him if there was anyway he could come home. I so didn't want to have to deal with this on my own. I knew it was not likely to take my life, but this was not a little thing and I didn't want to have to meet with doctors and make those kind of decisions on my own. Now also understanding why I felt so bad, it made me also want to have another adult in my house in case I did start feeling really lousy again. The good news for this story is that the military had him home just over 24 hours later...yippee. The bad news was that less then 2 hours after I asked Jeff if he could come home, I got a call from the base padre. Now in the 9 times that Jeff had deployed and the 5 months he spent down in Oklahoma, not once did I receive so much as a call from the military even though I was pregnant 2x's and home with a newborn (6 weeks old) another time. This padre wasn't calling to see if I was OK, or if I needed help. He was just calling to get the name and phone number of my family doctor to make sure I was telling the truth. I guess the upside to this was that when my sister Janet called me that evening to see how I was doing, I was so fumed at the padre that it took my mind of my new diagnosis. Guess there is a silver lining for everything.

I have to say I was so happy to have Jeff home. He got home on the Monday and was able to come with me to my family doctor. We didn't get much new news there, but she did say she wanted to refer me to an ENT (Ear Nose and Throat) specialist. She didn't have any names so we figured we'd do our own research and get back to her. That afternoon (which was also his birthday) Jeff walked over to an neighbour of ours that is a retired anaesthesiologist from Toronto to see if he might have some information or contacts. He told Jeff he was make a few calls and get back to us. Later that night after I had just got the girls down to bed the door bell rang. Here was our neighbour with the info already. He stayed told us of a ENT friend of his that didn't do this type of surgery, but he would do the initial assessment and then refer me onto 2 other doctors at Sunnybrook hospital in TO that do do this. He said these 2 guys are the top guys for this type of thing. Funny thing, I had actually just found their names on the Internet about an hour before. Since then I have also heard from 3 different sources that this are definitely the guys to see. So now it's just a waiting game until my appointment on the 25th of November with the ENT. I have to say that Jeff and I are really quite grateful that since I went to see my new family doctor we really haven't had to wait more then 2 weeks for appointments. I am just so happy I decided to dump the loser doctor here in Brighton. If I hadn't I still wouldn't know what was wrong with me. I'm also so happy that the doctor in Cobourg fit me into an MRI the day after my CT scan. We have been very blessed!

The week after my diagnosis has been a little weird in so far as getting used to the idea that I have this thing growing in my head. It was interesting to me that once I stopped trying to ignore all my symptoms (as I kept thinking it was just hormones and they'd go away) and actually started to pay attention to how I was feeling, it was a little amazing how really quite lousy I was feeling. In addition to the symptoms I already mentioned I realized that I basically go through the day nauseous and that the times I was thinking I was just being clumsy it's really that my balance it quite messed up. The other interesting this is that early in the summer Jeff had said that I should get my hearing checked, which I did and it turned out I had hearing loss in my left ear. Now we know why.