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Als Or Tremor Which Is It? |
By:
Bunnie |
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Als Or Tremor Which Is It?
Bunnie
After a fourteen year marriage that was completely disfunctional, I divorced with three young daughters. A few years after my divorce at age 35 I met and married a man sixteen years older than me. He was, and still is, the best thing that ever happened to me and my girls.
We had been very happily married only a couple of years when our worst nightmare began. One night as we got ready for bed when he layed down to go to sleep, he couldn't breath. Every time he layed flat he would immediately sit straight up and say I can't breath. This was one of the scariest things I've ever been through in my life.
Our first thoughts were lung cancer or something like that. My husband has always been a very social person so he loves to entertain. He smokes and drinks so we assumed that he was starting to suffer some serious consequences to his years of abusing his body with things that we all know aren't good for you.
We of course immediately made an appointment with our family doctor to try and find out what the problem was and what could be done to hopefully correct this problem. In the meantime he would sleep in a sitting position so that he could breath.
My husband owned a small consulting company and was forced to make a business trip the day after the doctor's appointment. When he was checking into the hotel the night before his business meetings started, he got a frantic call from the doctor's nurse. She said the doctor had the results of his tests and that the doctor wanted to see him right away. My husband basically went into a panick with this call. He explained to the nurse that he was out of town and that he could not return for several days and convinced her to let him talk to the doctor on the phone rather than wait several days and worry about this while trying to conduct business. The doctor explained to my husband that the xrays indicated his lungs were both about half collapsed and this was surely the reason he couldn't breath when he layed down. The dotor told him that he would need to see a respiratory specialist to find out why.
This was serious! When we tried to get an appointment with a respiratory specialist we were told it would be 2 weeks. For the next two weeks my husband would have to wait until he was totally exhausted and then hope to fall asleep sitting up in a chair.
When my husband's appointment day with the respiratory specialist finally came, we were of course very nervous. The doctor examined his xrays, gave him a test that measures a person's lung capacity, did a little poking and prodding and then announced that my husband was afflcted with ALS. He explained that ALS causes a loss of muscle control and and that in some severe cases the muscles affected could be partially if not completely paralyzed. The doctor told us that my husband's diaphram was paralyzed and his ability to breath at all was through the use of his chest muscles. His diagnosis was such that we were pretty convinced that he would most surely die from this condition since the diaphram is one of those muscles you can't really live without. His only recommendation was that we seek the advise of a neurologist for treatments of this disease.
We asked what could be done about a paralyzed diaphram. Couldn't he use a respirator or some type of device that would help him breath. The doctor explained to us that the diaphram moves your stomach out of the way so your lungs can expand when you breath. He further said that a respirator can put air into your lungs but can't necessarily move your stomach out of the way allowing the lungs to expand and fill. We asked him how he could be so sure since his examination seemed to be so simple and short. He further explained that one of the first indications of ALS is a loss of muscle control and he had noticed a tremor in my husband's hands and neck during his exam, true indicators of ALS muscle control loss.
Of course we immediately made and appointment with a neurologist as recommended by the respiratory specialist. Once again, it would be several weeks before we could be seen. So for another several weeks my husband was burdened with trying to sleep in an upright position sitting in a chair. As we waited things seem to get progressively worse. We also found that my husband would become short of breath doing the simplest of things like just walking from the car to the store. He would have to sit and catch his breath after only walking maybe a hundred feet or so. We were both pretty convinced that the respiratory doctor's diagnosis must be right given the seriousness of my husband's breathing problem.
Finally the day of the appointment with the neurologist arrives. The doctor does a very in depth examination of my husband, asks about his tremors, tells him to walk a straght line, follow my finger etc. And then the bombshell! The doctor says, "no, you don't have ALS"
The neurologist told us that after reviewing my husband's medical records that showed visits to other doctors over the years about his nervous shake, that his tremor was nothing more than a fairly common nervous disorder called an "essential benign tremor". He went on to explain this was a non life threatening nervous disorder that could be controlled with medications. This made perfect sense to us since my husband explained that he had this nervous shake since he was a teen and over the years he had found ways to deal with it. That explained the tremor, but what about my husband's innability to breath? The neurologist said that my husband's diaphram was in fact paralyzed and that we needed to schedule an encephlomiogardiogram test to determine the extent of the paralysis.
This test was described to me by my husband as where they attached several dozen electrodes to his body and then subjected him to an intense barrage of small but very painful shocks randomly over his body to measure his muscle and nervous system reactions and it's ability to carry the signals from his brain to his muscles. He described the level of shock as that of holding onto a car's spark plug and having it discharge hundreds of times in a matter of minutes. It was the only time I've ever seen this man cry from any type of pain.
After this test was completed, my husband remembered that several days before his conditon came up that he had fallen through a deck that was being added to a freinds house. He said that as he fell throuh the deck he reached up with both arms and grabbed the lower support beams to make sure he didn't fall on his head since the deck was about ten feet above the ground. Although he said he had some shoulder discomfort the next day from this he didn't think he had been injured in any other way.
AHA the doctor explained! This was most likely the cause of the problem. The sudden jerking of my husband's body when he tried to stop his fall had most likely damaged the frenic nerve that sends signals to the diaphram from the brain. After reviewing the results of the test he further explained that although the diaphram was paralyzed the signals from his brain to his diaphram were getting through but that they just weren't strong enough to have my husband's diaphram respond normally.
Finally three year later my husband's frenic nerve has repaired itself. His lungs have re-inflated, he can now do pretty much everything he did before the accident. The only problem he has now is figuring out how to lose the thirty pounds he gained during that time of doing nothing but sitting around fighting to breath. So the moral here is... always get a second opinion.
Sadly over the almost four years it took for his frenic nerve to repair itself my husband's business failed because he couldn't work. We started a couple of online stores in hopes of replacing the lost income. Even though niether of us are even close to being computer experts, we have managed to get them up and working. All we need now is the knowledge to figure out how to get people to find the stores and hopefully buy some of our products. We are always willing to take advise or recommendations if anyone knows how to help us make it work.
True Story.
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Article Source: http://www.statssheet.com/articles/article67499.html |
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