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Like a bad penny...

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mouser:
Good to see you, Vurbal  :Thmbsup: :Thmbsup: :Thmbsup:  And know that you are always welcome here.
-jesse

Vurbal:
Good to see you, Vurbal  :Thmbsup: :Thmbsup: :Thmbsup:  And know that you are always welcome here.
-jesse
-mouser (February 13, 2022, 11:35 PM)
--- End quote ---
It's great to be back! And I've always felt welcome here.  :)

Vurbal:
After letting my local neurologist know about Mayo's decision, and that my symptoms continue to get worse, he managed to squeeze me in this morning. After a nudge in the right direction from me, he agreed that it's a good idea to do an brain scan (EEG) at this point. It seems insane to me that I would have to suggest that myself, but that's the state of neurological diagnostics today apparently. The reason nobody thought to do this before is simply that it's normally only used to diagnose seizures, which I don't appear to have.

The flip side of that is that you can't always identify seizures from external symptoms. Several years ago I read about a study, at Harvard IIRC, where they were performing brain scans on a group of autistic individuals. Along the way, they discovered that one of the subjects wasn't actually on the spectrum. The scan showed regular seizures occurring in his prefrontal cortex.

Vurbal:
My EEG results came back normal, which will surprise anyone who's known me for very long.  :tellme:

On one hand it's disappointing not to find anything out, but on the other hand, I actually did. The EEG tells me that my brain isn't aware there's anything screwy with my senses. It didn't even register when I felt the pulsing of a strobe light in my fingers and toes. My previous tests eliminated the long nerves spreading out from the spinal cord and the short nerves that create muscle groups.

That basically leaves my spinal cord, which is where I've believed the problem to be all along. Because my nerves in my head are affected, I can further narrow it down to the topmost part of my spinal cord. Beyond that, it still doesn't make any sense.

I've got a month and a half to educate myself on the spinal cord and brainstem before my next appointment. I found a neuroscience study guide for medical students on Audible, which I listen to when my eyes are too worn out to read or watch videos. Other than that, I'm still scouring the Internet for anything useful.

Vurbal:
About 2 weeks ago I was practicing my bass in the living room. Over the last few months it's felt like I was learning to play all over again, and I've developed a bad habit of staring at my fretboard, so I decided to start practicing in front of a mirror. That way I can eyeball position changes without looking down. After about 20 minutes I had to stop. My head was spinning like never before, my balance and coordination were even further off than usual, and I felt incredibly weak. The only thing that helped was reading on my phone in a brightly lit environment.

That was actually a big breakthrough for me, because now I realize that my symptoms at least aren't as complicated as they seem. There are actually 2 groups of symptoms. The first is the loss of information from literally every sense except sight and hearing. The others are caused by the motion sickness resulting from my vision sensing motion my body can't feel. I have the equivalent of VR sickness or space sickness, except worse, because I've almost entirely lost sensation in my internal organs.

This doesn't exactly get me closer to a diagnosis, but it does clarify the problem significantly. Since I won't be seeing my neurologist for almost 3 weeks, I did some testing on my own, hoping to verify my motion sickness hypothesis, and I'm sure of it now. I'm also really sick (pun intended) of motion sickness testing.

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