updates

Ok, here's the update.
None of my doctors think I have a CSF leak anymore. To any other person, I think this would be good news, but when they told me that, I was pretty upset. The pain and other problems hadn't gone away, so I thought the leaks had to still be there but that they were just tired of trying to find them. They told us they were convinced something was still wrong, but they really didn't think it was a leak. So they sent me back to have another MRI.

Last week, since they still weren't letting me drive, Dad took me to my neurology appointment where we saw the MRI results. We were looking at the pictures and I knew immediately something wasn't right. My untrained eye couldn't point it out, but something didn't look right. My doctor said that it was a Chiari Malformation. I knew this term because it's what some of my doctors had suspected from the beginning, but could never find any evidence of it. I won't go into great detail (that's what Google is for), but a CM is basically when the brain drops and rests on the skull instead of floating in the CSF like it should. It can happen from low CSF pressure, or it can be present from birth as some sort of defect. They say if you have it when you're a baby, you won't notice any symptoms until you're into early adulthood. The pictures showed that my brain is in fact sitting on the bottom of my skull, my brain stem is inside of my spinal canal, and the bottom of my brain is being severely compressed which is what causes the severe head and neck pain. (I hope you're not eating right now)

Anyway, to any other person, this would have been bad news. I was pretty excited though. In 2 years, it's the first concrete evidence that I'm not making all this up. And for the first time my doctors can actually see exactly what's wrong so hopefully, they can come up with a better treatment plan.
Some of the doctors don't want to treat this, so I'm going to have to put up a fight about it.

That's the nutshell. I'll let y'all know when they decide to do something...