Update on Amber's Health Fiasco

We have been so slack on updating our blog -- our apologies! Paul has been busy teaching himself new skills, such as building a webpage, which means our very basic webpage is getting a very major makeover! With that in mind, Amber realized how much she had been slacking on the blog and decided it might be time to get it in gear! :)

So let's start with what's been going on since last fall. Many of you know that I (Amber) came down with a mystery illness beginning in September. After many, many doctors visits and many, many more tests, we came away with a lot of interesting information. For starters, I have all major organs and they all appear to be functioning normally! That may sound kind of strange -- am I the only one who wonders if maybe I'm missing vital organs just because no one has confirmed they're there? I am? Well, okay, I'm a weirdo then. ;o) It was determined that I don't have celiac disease (allergy to gluten) so that was good news since I love me some gluten. The main suspect in all of the digestive and nausea issues was a parasite or a bacteria brought back from Guatemala (which seemed incredibly likely since I accidentally got water in my mouth while on the trip). However, test after test didn't find anything conclusive.

I prodded my internal medicine doctor to maybe take a rabbit trail and check out my gallbladder in the off-chance that my symptoms were not Guatemala-related. He agreed to order me an ultrasound to check for gallstones. While at that appointment, the tech asked if I was experiencing pain on my left side, which was perplexing because I hadn't had any pain at all - just a lot of nausea and digestive problems. After leaving the appointment, I got a call from my doctor within hours saying the ultrasound revealed a large something on my spleen. I was told to be at the radiology department first thing the next morning for a CT scan. Just as a side note, when one is very nauseous, downing two jugs of dye is TORTURE. But with lots of prayers from friends and family (THANK YOU), I managed to get most of the dye down -- enough to get good scans of my spleen. Five minutes of picture taking and an hour of waiting later, I was told that I have a 9cm splenic cyst (the size of a baseball) that they suspected was due to some sort of trauma to that area. However, I have never had a car accident or any sort of accident that caused trauma to that area. But onward we went to continue trying to determine the cause of my symptoms.

The next stop was to the Gastro doctor. After an endoscopy and partial sigmoidoscopy, it was determined that I don't have h. pylori bacteria, no polyps, no acid reflux, nothing at all. So that was also all good news. They decided to run a blood test for a parasite called echinocococcus which is a type of tapeworm that is very rare in the U.S. but one that does cause cysts on organs. Two blood tests returned an "indeterminate" reading, meaning my levels came back in the "not negative but not positive" range. Since the Gastro doctors couldn't find anything that would be causing my symptoms, they referred me to Asheville Infectious Diseases for a second opinion on the echinocococcus parasite.

I finally met with that office toward the end of January (and thankfully was starting to have more "good days" than bad). He said he wanted to run one more blood test for the parasite but that since I was starting to feel somewhat better, he thought my body was working through whatever it was. I gave blood that day but soon thereafter, I started to feel good again. So as far as my symptoms go, it seems I probably came back with a bacteria or something from Guatemala and after four months, my body worked it out on its own. I felt pretty much back to normal through most of February and March. :o)

You can imagine my surprise when I got a phone call on March 18th from the Infectious Disease office telling me the last blood test I did came back positive for echinococcosis. Since I have the large cyst and I had a positive blood result, we started discussing the process of treating the parasite. The treatment regimen would include taking a drug called Albendazole for three months (the purpose to kill the adult parasite the first month, kill any eggs that had hatched the second month, and then any other eggs that hatched the third month). After treating with the drug for three months, the next step would be complete removal of my spleen.

After determining the process for treatment, I was asked to come in and giving a metabolic liver reading (since the medication can cause liver problems) so they would have a baseline reading. I gave them that on April 3rd assuming we'd be starting the drug within a week or two. Imagine our surprise when we got a positive pregnancy test on April 6th! HA! For those of you who know our back story, after losing two pregnancies in the first trimester then trying for two and a half years to get pregnant unsuccessfully, the shock of finally getting a positive in the midst of all of the other medical ongoings was  ... well ... a shock! But a good one! It seemed obvious to us that God had His hands all over this one - and we've been trusting Him along this journey.

I'll update about the pregnancy in my next post.