Monday, August 23, 2010

IVIG

The doctors in the Neurology Department at Northwestern apparently get together once a month or so and talk about certain patients and get feedback from each other. A couple weeks ago I was the subject of conversation. I had to wait for a while to talk to my doctor's nurse to get even a little info on what they talked about at the meeting but she told me that before they try the VNS device (implanted in my chest and neck) they were going to try a procedure called IVIG (Intravenous Immunoglobulin). I've been doing a ton of research but from what I've read it's a solution made up of plasma from thousands of donors and it's pumped into my veins. They do it for a couple of months. I understand it (through very complicated explanations online) as a solution that suppresses infection in the brain. Maybe because I'm not responding to medication there's something else in there (like an infection/disease) that's still active. After all, I got Epilepsy from Encephalitis.

Either way, it seems better than surgery at this point but it makes me kind of nervous that there may be something lurking in there that I've had for all this time.