Overall, so far, so good. The fatigue is gradually ebbing away, my legs are getting stronger (albeit of a morning I still feel like I'm wading through water, but this improves as the day passes), my eyes have stopped stinging - actually I must give Bear some credit for this, he popped to the shops one Saturday afternoon (I refused to be budged from the sofa; the weekend = guilt-free slobbing) and came back with a selection of items: a large box of After Eights, Cosmopolitan magazine, Original Source shower gel and bubble bath (my favourite) and some Optrex dry eyes spray. Bless him - random but very thoughtful. The fogginess that plagued my ability to think quickly has lifted and although I still can't do two things at once very well, I feel that I can mentally see a bigger picture and solve problems quicker. My memory still isn't back to normal, it takes me a long time to recall books that I read a couple of weeks ago or even specific words - I have to describe the word to Bear who then looks at me like I'm a bit of an idiot!
There is another new symptom though - muscle spasms. When lying in bed my upper leg muscles contract and jerk my left leg upwards, which has, so far, only happened once on Wednesday night. According to Bear it continued for half an hour after I had fallen asleep and he wasn't especially happy that he didn't manage to get to sleep until gone 1am! Oh well, it's sweet revenge for all of the nights his snoring has kept me awake.
A number of people have mentioned Lyme Disease to me and the possibility that this could be the cause of my problems as opposed to MS. I did mention in my first blog that blood samples had been sent to Serology whilst I was in A&E to test for both Lyme and Weil's Disease. The former was particularly relevant because I had been bitten, by what I had assumed to be a mosquito, on my right leg whilst at Peterborough Beer Festival the Saturday of the August Bank Holiday. It was held in the middle of a field on quite a damp day, and who knows if there could have been ticks in the area. The rash that developed over the course of the next day was that of a "bullseye" rash, which is typical of a tick bite - an example is below:
It has crossed my mind that this could be the cause for all of the symptoms, as Lyme Disease has very similar symptoms. There is clinical evidence that in the later stages of Lyme Disease demyelinating involvement of central nervous system can develop and MS can be erroneously diagnosed. This is very interesting given that my most recent brain scan showed evidence of possible demyelination. Whilst I have many friends and family telling me that Lyme Disease would be the "lesser of two evils", it worries me a tremendous amount that if it has advanced to the point where it is has caused signal change in my brain then it is most likely to have caused permanent damage and cause episodic flare up of symptoms. I don't yet know enough about the treatment of Lyme Disease, but at the moment the only saving grace is that whilst it mimics MS it may not become progressively worse and debilitating.
