Medical Mystery and Craziness

As some of you know, Chad has been battling with different health issues for quite a long time. Years ago, while at seminary he started having issues with stroke like symptoms and migraines. They would eventually go away but no one could ever find anything that caused the problems.

The most promising thing we had was from a neurologist about 2 years ago. After visiting all other neurologists here in Columbus except this one we were afraid we were going to have to start asking for a referral to one in Atlanta. The neurologist that we visited then basically said that all of the medication he was on, and there was TONS of it, were not necessary. He told us at the end of the visit that he thought that the problems were due to one of two possible diagnoses. The first was Hypokalemic Paralysis and the other was ALS. When he said the ALS, we were more nervous as Chad’s maternal grandfather had this. However, he reassured us that he really didn’t think that it was ALS because Chad gets better and ALS patients usually only decline in health and don’t have improvements. Of course he wanted more tests, etc. to be run to determine for sure and then…..the insurance basically ran out. BCBS had basically increased the premiums for Chad’s policy to the point where it was almost as much as our mortgage payment each month and there was NO WAY we could afford that. We couldn’t continue with testing, etc. because of the lack of insurance. I started doing some research on Hypokalemic Paralysis and it started making sense. It’s basically a drop in potassium levels that cause the ‘stroke-like paralysis’ symptoms, headaches, etc. We started watching him more closely with diet, he stayed off sodas, drank more juices, and ate more foods with higher potassium levels and tried to also watch the carb intake. He still had some issues but they weren’t ever as long lasting as they had been in the past.

Back at the end of July he had a ‘spell’ and was having to use his cane for a couple of weeks. On the 27th we made a trip with our youth to The Basement in Birmingham and basically he said that “me and God had a conversation while we were there and He told me ‘All things are new!’ and from that point I felt immediately better and didn’t need the cane.” I just love miracles, don’t you!? He had been fine up until this past Tuesday.

On Tuesday (31st) Chad had a seizure like episode that caused a DRASTIC mood shift. Later that day he had another one (probably about an hour or two later) and things completely changed. His mood was better but we realized that he had basically no memory of anything for almost the entire past 2 years. He learned, again, that my stepmother passed away a year ago along with other losses in the family, births in the family etc. He didn’t even remember any of our church family from King’s Pasture (we started going there in October 2 years ago). He has been re-learning people, places, etc. We did have a couple of ‘breakthroughs’ this weekend with this memory loss. We were visiting with some friends and got to talking about allergies. Occasionally I will have a reaction to a spice or a combination of spices and it will cause my face to itch. Sometimes it is more severe than others. As we were talking about it Chad got to thinking and said “when was that last time it was so bad?” Then he paused a minute and said “I know! We were downtown somewhere, like at the Cannon Brew Pub…and we were with them!” (pointing to our friends from church that since Tuesday he couldn’t really remember). I thought about it for a minute and said that he was right. That WAS the last major one I had. AND it happened this past July…as a matter of fact, the Friday after our trip to The Basement that I mentioned earlier. Later on, we were discussing something that happened with a building in Columbus and he made the comment about ‘not knowing about those steel building people’ in a joking manner. One of our other friends from church that was with us actually does steel buildings for a living but we had not mentioned that to Chad at all when we were ‘re-introducing’ him to folks. So that ‘joke’ came from somewhere.

He went to work with his dad today and we still covet your prayers. (I was not able to convince him to let me take him to The Medical Center for a CAT scan because he didn’t want to deal with the bills later.) Pray for complete memory restoration and permanent healing so that we don’t have this situation, or worse, again.