By this point, Christopher needed a break from being poked and prodded. He’d made good progress on the amitriptyline, but we had always intended to visit my parents’ Texas ranch in May. He was still hopeful that the medicine, which takes 3-4 weeks to titrate into your system, would eliminate his headache. He was also really scared of doing the cerebral angiogram if Dr. Ahn ordered it, because it would require an IV and going to sleep (I’m still amazed by the things that scare him, they’re never the things I’d guess). So we rescheduled his appointment with Dr. Ahn for June 14 so that we could spend some time off the train.
You can’t really completely ignore these medical diagnoses, especially since we were still trying to process whether or not to go ahead with the Chiari surgery. Once again, I was worried CYA medicine was at play with the AVM diagnosis, and I was seriously contemplating whether it was really capable of harming him or not. Part of that is that I had pretty well followed Dr. Groves’ recommendation not to Google the condition, so I still knew very little of what it was, or what it could do. But Dr. Bernier had asked us not to “check in” as part of his headache plan, so I tried to reign in the desire, as a scientist, to document and detail every symptom. Christopher, for his part, spent as much time at the ranch as he could. Getting there had been pretty rough on him, and the final day of our road trip had spawned a nasty migraine. He tired more easily than usual, several very active days would follow several days on the couch, and he still had a very short fuse for frustration, but the scary, is-my-kid-having-a-stroke-or-seizure? headaches were all gone. In general, though, he spent a lot of time having fun and being a kid, whether he was fishing, petting horses, playing pool, or driving the EZ-Go. And we did manage to squeeze some touristy stuff into both road trips, visiting both Biltmore Estate and the Kentucky Horse Park on our 5600 mile journey.
No comments:
Post a Comment