I have to play major catch-up here. Life gets in the way and it's been very busy, but there is great news on the helminth front.
I did rebound very well from the lidocaine. It just took a couple of weeks. My energy levels were great, my daughter has been doing very well, so we were happy. My husband was very, very impressed by how well I was feeling. He had the worst year of his life, energy-wise the previous year.
My DH is thirty-five and healthy except for a lot of autoimmune issues. He has severe allergies (especially to dust mites) and psoriasis. He has two very severe, large plaques on his legs, one on each shin, that never go away. No medication works on them at all. He's also extremely congested in his upper airway virtually always. This issue is beyond just annoying; he was diagnosed with hypopnea (impaired breathing during sleep) after he totaled our car in the end of February. His allergies have a major negative impact on his ability to sleep and function.
DH also has/had chronic diarrhea over twenty years. He was so used to it, it never even occurred to him that anything was wrong until I pointed it out after years of being married that normal people do not have diarrhea that makes them live in the bathroom four days a week. I forced him to get a colonoscopy last year, which led to a vague diagnosis of something like irritable bowel syndrome.
Our son, who is six, unfortunately also has the same allergies as everyone in our family. He started the allergic march in infancy, having allergies by six months. His constant congestion and bad allergies led to recurrent ear infections. He has now had two sets of tubes and two adenoidectomies. He was diagnosed as being at risk for PDD-NOS, an autism spectrum disorder when he was eighteen months old. Five years later and huge amounts of work and remediation, the major artifacts of the neurological damage he incurred were right side body weakness, hypotonia and severe weakness in his hands, so bad that I was told in June, 2011 that we should anticipate him never being able to actually write longhand. He has attention problems and residual sensory issues as well as part of his very mild autism.
Last summer, our son also unfortunately got PANDAS after partially losing his tube from his right ear. It was stuck halfway out of the ear drum, got extremely infected and stayed that way from June until September. He had surgery in September to place new tubes and remove adenoidal scar tissue. It healed perfectly but the PANDAS stuck around despite being on antibiotics for months -- from July to November. PANDAS is an acronym for Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal infections. It is a nightmare to deal with because it causes extreme anxiety and obsessive compulsive behavior. My son had severe separation anxiety that came out of nowhere, as in asking me 25 times an hour where I was when I hadn't moved from my desk and he was fifteen feet away. He also became obsessively destructive, taking things apart and out of drawers. It would get a little better with antibiotics but as soon as the course ended, it would come roaring back. His sensory issues, which were bad back when he was 18 months old, came roaring back. Most obvious was his propensity to mouth and chew his sleeves. He chewed holes in every long sleeved shirt he owned between October and mid-November. The day we went to see the PANDAS specialist at Children's Hospital, he chewed apart the entire seam of the sleeve of his favorite sweater.
We decided to return to San Diego and get DH and DS inoculated with hookworm in the beginning of November. The major improvement we were hoping for was a significant decrease in allergy symptoms.
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