| in a non Z manner. Back before Christmas.. when I posted my year end thing I mentioned there was something else going on I didn't want to comment on at the time. Figured it was time to pull back the curtain a bit because I wanted to thank someone who has gone WAY far out of his way in my estimation to take care of my personal needs. Dec 6th to be exact I was laying on my bad-ass custom spec made couch (thanks aspendog!) and got up after watching some morning TV. Odd.. if you know the hours I keep I don't get much time to watch TV at all.. much less Saturday morning. Odd weekend because it was a LAN party going on and my schedule was all out of whack. Anyway... I get up and the entire left side of my body is numb from the neck down. Quickly the numbness wore off, but stayed in my arm and leg and a little in my trunk. I figured I just pinched a nerve in my neck and it would work its way out... Continued on with the LAN deal until I packed up Sunday night and headed home. I figured I needed to find out what the hell was up with this numbness crap so I called a tt.NET member who I'd done some Z work for in the recent past, neurozurgeon. He was one of my favorite new clients before all this crap happened because 1. he's a hell of a nice guy 2. I'm really interested in his profession. Matter of fact, I took his #266 certificate to Japan with me prior to this for Mr. K to sign for him. Something exclusive for a very special and collectable Z32. I explain to him what was going on and he semi freaked on me.. I needed attention pronto. He gets me into the imaging center the next night and gets some CT scans done of my head and neck (yes, I have scientific proof my head is NOT empty). He wasn't seeing everything he wanted to see... so he works me into the MRI scene for better imaging.. they have a 4 week wait. I'm in right then... still no signs of any funky trauma to cause my numb condition. Good news and bad news... He scrambles through a laundry list of possibilities and decides I need to see this neurologist he works with... whatever, I need to get my insurance company involved now, so I have to go see my PCP before doing anything else. I go to my PCP and they can't find anything obvious wrong with me. Blood work, EKG (something was not normal there) examination blah blah blah... we need to refer you to a neurologist. OK, I got that taken care of through neurozurgeon to meet whoever his referal neurologist is. PCP wants me to come back for echo cardiogram stuff. Great. More crap I'm going to have to pay for. Neurozurgeon puts me on a low dose of steroids to stabilize my spine in case there is an inflammation going on. Well.. I get to see this neurologist a couple days later. I find out he's basically the head of the MS program and there's like a 9 month wait to get a consultation. My total wait? About 6 days. Why? Neurozureon got me in the front of the line. Dr. Nameless neurologist does a very complete diagnosis during the consultation. Found really nothing. I'm scheduled to come back in a couple days for a Lumbar Puncture (spinal tap) and to draw more blood. 6 viles worth. $3.5k worth of blood work on top of who knows how much for the CT & MRI stuff... oh, we did a second more detailed pass on the MRI stuff a couple days after the first pass, so now I have an MRI from the top of my head to the end of my spine if you want to see it. Pretty cool, but inconclusive. The LP procedure was fairly easy. Only minor discomfort and no headache afterward. The next day I was sore because I basically had had a nail jammed 4cm into my spine. Nameless raises my steroid intake to half of what he might normally perscribe. This is a significant bit of info. I come back the next day for 'evoked potentials' testing where you get shocked for like an hour and watch some test patterns on a TV to see if you nerves are working in a timely fashion. Tech says I shouldn't lose any sleep over it, looks normal. OK, great... we keep knocking off stuff but the really scarey possibilities are still open until we get results back next week. The steroids are doing some weird crap to me now that I've been on them for a week and my doseage had been raised a couple days ago. I go to a office Christmas party w/ the GF. I discover I can't taste the food. Uhg... this is going to suck. I've never been on steroids before, but I understand what the side effects can be... I learn some more before it's all over with, cause I get them ALL. Waiting for results to come back during Christmas week. Steroids start to scramble the crap out of my brain, my voice is gone, I'm gimpy, I can't taste food, I stop getting the urge to go to the head, so that's all scheduled every so often before I crap myself :-( I can't sleep well, I get nose bleeds (I've never had a nosebleed in my life outside of after a good fight), my body breaks out in chickenpox looking bumps... then my face. I looked like I was 16 again. My stomach was a mess, I'm popping perscription antiacid pills 4 times a day. I'd wake up at 4:30am and my brain was FULL throttle concentrating on the craziest things, mostly the possibilities of what was going on, MS, or something else, throwing me into a downward spiral of depression. I did come up with a pretty spectacular chunk of technology 300 Degree is prototyping right now. That's the only good thing that came from the insane brain scramble. There were some other things, my emotions were pretty whacked. I cried while watching playoff football once (that's just F'ed up), and it wasn't that Saints game where Ray Finkle showed up on the field after that triple lateral thing for 75 yards or whatever that monkey circus was to keep the dream alive. My GF cried after that one instead. I mostly was happy to get day to day w/o dying or having the GF stab me with a fork in the eye (I was a real prick during all this.. not intentionally tho). Watching the clock tick by the minutes. Not being able to concentrate on things and still running this site and doing 300 Degree's year end, not being able to look for legit work because any interview would be a scrambled mess and not getting to work on Zs. Just a big penalty kill. Neurozurgeon is keeping tabs on me while logging his hours at the office (he works more hours in a week then you and I and someone else put together since he's on call all the damn time.. and this is no lie). My results keep coming back negative from everything. He's checking them and reporting back to me before the Nameless office calls me so that kept me ahead of the game, I didn't spend any extra time wondering what the results were. My brain needed that, a little something to worry about really got blown out of proportion. I have my followup with Dr. Nameless and he has nothing to add really. He's now convinced it's not MS, but won't totally rule it out until we do a followup in a year. I just remember logik's mom's battle with MS a few years back. God bless her. All the other scarey possibilities like menengitis etc are ruled out through the bloodwork and LP results. Idiopathic is what I'm diagnosed as being (insert smartass comment here). Sucks. My numbness is mostly in my shin and the top of my foot at this point, so it's receding somewhat. I'm ramping off my steroids but things are just getting worse... I couldn't wait to get all that shit out of my system. That was probably the worst part of this episode.. moreso then just having a numb shin. My echo cardiograms come and go, everything turns out to be AOK there as well... so that's good news. The only positive I got out of all the testing was my cholesterol is slightly high. So here I sit typing this thing just to say thank you so very much Shawn. He was/is available anytime I had questions or concerns and guided this whole situation in a way I never would have been privvy to just being some slacker off the street going to visit his clueless PCP and ending up waiting for some slacker neurologist to tell me to take 2 asprin and call again in a month. I got top flight+ treatment anywhere he was concerned and I truely appreciate that... Cliff Notes: Damon was potentially scarey sick and might have been deadified, potentially killing tt.NET with him if member neurozurgeon hadn't taken care of his situation. OK, that's a slight exageration in retrospect, but in a day by day recount, there was a lot of time where no one knew WTF was wrong with Damon.. that was freaky enough.. not to mention the damn steroid side effects. Damon wrote this thing out for you to get an idea of the gravity of things and to say thank you to neurozurgeon publically since it's well deserved. Oh and thanks to the GF for NOT stabbing Damon with a fork, even though it was probably deserved as well. Morals from this tale for you the tt.NET member: 1. Be nice to people, it generally doesn't cost anything. Eventually this niceness will pay you back in a big way. Stop being a jackass, you jackass. 2. Network with your fellow Z folks outside just owning a Z. For me it's rather simple since I run this site and I work on Z cars privately and I talk to the owners about what they do and their hobbies usually. It's amazing what the returns can be if you are more sociable and less of a jackass, you jackass. Thanks for reading.
Later
   If you need Z32/Z33 work done in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, I've done most everything from oil changes to engine rebuilds. E-mail me for a quote please. When was the last time you *really* did something with your Z to call yourself a Z enthusiast? Member #1 PETZ
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10:26:37 02/14/04
