Promising athlete, mysterious symptoms. Hmm?
Here is another familiar story about a young man sidelined with mysterious symptoms and no solution. He was tested for Lyme disease five times. I hope the tests were not all done by the same lab.
Excerpted from the Star Exponet ( Posted: 05/08/2010 )
… That headache signaled the beginning of a seven-month journey that has transformed a healthy, promising student athlete into a shell of his former self while keeping him off of the baseball field and out of the classroom.
“Everything is hard: Not being able to go to prom my senior year, not getting to go on any senior trips,” Ferrell said. “Everybody is getting into colleges and planning for next year. I can’t even plan for tomorrow.”
The pain searing between Coy’s temples on that September day hasn’t receded for more than a couple of hours at a time.
His list of symptoms has grown to include short-term memory loss, stuttering and double and triple vision, which keeps him from reading or driving.
On top of it all, partial numbness in his right arm and leg from just above the elbow and knee down has forced the 18-year-old senior at Culpeper County High School to walk with a cane.
Doctors have tested Ferrell for Lyme Disease at least five times. They’ve offered possibilities such as a migraine disorder, fluid collecting on the brain, a stress-related disorder and even that Coy was doing all of this to get back at his parents.
But it was during his inpatient care at U.Va. that a neurosurgeon gave Ferrell a harrowing new hypothesis — the numbness on his right side may be a result of the left side of his brain progressively shutting down.
For the full article: http://www2.starexponent.com/cse/sports/high_school_prep/high_school_baseball/article/trial_by_fire/57224/
Lyme Handbook 