Can't Stop the Seizures - but Positive Progress Continues

While Michele has been doing very well since the last post - regaining use of her left hand, using her computer again and replying to emails, standing up with my assistance for a minute at a time in the mornings before transfer to her wheelchair, prepping her own toothbrush every evening now and requiring no assistance with washing up at bed time...all miraculous improvements in such a short time, she continues to battle seizures and had a grand-mal seizure last night that lasted for a short (for her) 8 minutes.

It took about an hour post-seizure for her to be able to muster any verbal communication and then could only produce "yeah". It was comforting though that immediately after her seizure, within minutes she was able to communicate with blinks and could still work out a partial smile. A couple of mg of lorazepam helped to quiet the electrical brain-storm.

Consequently, I have increased her Keppra back up to it's full prescribed dose of 1000mg 2 times a day even though she has had what the Dr.'s call "breakthrough seizures" in the past at the same full dose and then even with other anti-epileptics in the mix. I think that where there is a lesion in the wrong place in the brain, there will be a seizure unless there is so much medication that a person is fully sedated. Living life in a fog is not a reasonable trade to avoid seizures, especially if the seizures continue to be as innocuous as yesterday's.

Michele's first seizure a few years ago took out a full year and a half of her memories and caused a lasting short term memory problem that has just recently resolved, so we will be careful until we can get some MRI's that show lack of related lesion activity.

I am keeping the minocycline at 100mg/day and the nightly Naltrexone, and until the seizure aura's subside Michele will take lorazepam, especially before bed.

We have reasonable hope that we are still on the right path to at least stop the MS for long enough to see progress with all the MS research that is going on. Here are some promising advances:

personalized autologous autoreactive t-cell vaccination:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tovaxin

and an alpha-cobratoxin derived agent that affects the IL27 cytokine:

http://www.nutrapharma.com/display.php?newsid=115