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Showing posts from April, 2010

When is it time for Imuran?

Over the past 3 years I have been on various dosages of Prednisone (http://www.drugs.com/search.php?searchterm=Mestinon&is_main_search=1) and Mestinon (http://www.drugs.com/prednisone.html) to manage the various symptoms of Myesthenia Gravis. For about 1 year, post thymectomy, I was relatively symptom free and required a low dose of Predisone and Mestinon. It was really quite amazing, the thymectomy had reduced my Predisone intake from 60mg to 5mg and Mestinon from 12 x 60mg to 4 x 60mg. Myesthenia is a disease which can go into , or come out of, remission of symptoms without warning . Well, after about a year my symptoms returned – focused in the bulbar area – the neck, mouth, eye and throat area. So, my Neurologist increased the dosages accordingly – my symptoms started to get better for about 6 months, at which point we decide start to decrease medications. Again, symptoms remained stable for about 3 months but them flared up again. It is because of the relatively unreliable eff

A Mystery Diagnosis . .

In  March of 2008,    I began experiencing strange onset of symptoms. I noticed that my jaw would start to tire (the muscles in my jaw and mouth weakened) after about a minute of so, while chewing food and speaking.   I began having trouble controlling the movement of my tongue.  I attributed this odd behavior jaw to general a cold, brushed it off, and waited to see if the symptoms persisted after I got back home.   Upon retuning back to Toronto, my symptoms became oddly worse – I had little to no jaw/tongue muscle power – I could only manage to speak or chew for about 2s at a time and had to rest my jaw/tounge to regain any muscle use. Moreover, I cold not lift my neck up from a horizontal position.   Soon thereafter, I a had several choking episodes as my throat muscles stopped firing as well.  Well,  I was terrified and suspected everything from stroke, to seizures. After 10 separate diagnoses in-and-out of various hospitals, clinics and specialist, I had no answer.  I had lost 20l