Update 2

Ok, I've had a day to cool off. So here's the scoop on how things are going. I write this so that those of you who care about us know what's going on, and so you can pray for Liane. Just so you know, she's ok with me putting this all on here.

Liane's symptoms started about a month ago, just after we got home from our honeymoon. It only occurred to us a few days ago when the symptoms began to resemble West Nile Virus (WNV) that she got a lot of mosquito bites while we were at Lester Beach (near Grand Beach). The pain started in her legs, almost as restless leg syndrome. The first few days, the pain only began in the evening, and after a good massage, it subsided, and she was fine. The the pain got worse, and the massages didn't help any more. So we tried advil, tylenol, robaxacet, etc at night. This helped for a while, but now it doesn't do a lot. We thought she might be low on calcium or magnesium or something, so we bought some vitamin/mineral supplements, but this helped nothing. In the last two weeks, the pain has progressed to her neck, shoulders, back, and in the last week or so, her jaw. The pain is more severe, and it's there all day and night. She has nausea, get tired very quickly, and has little appetite.

We went to urgent care the first time last monday. The doctor checked all the usual stuff...blood pressure, yada, yada, yada. Everything checked out ok. They did some blood tests, which we assumed included a blood test for WNV. At this point we didn't know that the WNV test is a separate test that has to be sent in to Winnipeg, and that normal blood tests do not show anything. The blood tests all came back negative...everything was fine. Liane asked the doctor (or was it a nurse...can't remember) if she had WNV. The doctor said "no, then it would have showed up on the blood test". Then we found out that they hadn't even tested for it.

Saturday morning I was getting pretty concerned. Liane went to work for the first time in a week but really, she could hardly function. But she's a fighter, and didn't want people to think she was weak. I did a little research on WNV and after finding that her symptoms matched that of WNV, I called Health Links, a government run health-care hotline. The had a special line for WNV, so I spoke ot a nurse from there. I explained the situation, and she said though she obviously can't diagnose something over the phone, it sounded like it could be WNV, and that we should get her tested for it ASAP.

We went to Boundary Trail Health Center Saturday afternoon. We spent five hours there. First we waited, then a nurse took all her information, then we waited, then a doctor-in-training asked her a lot of questions, and gave her a pretty thorough examination. Then we waited for almost an hour until the "real" doctor came. He sat down and proceeded to tell us that it couldn't be WNV, and even if it was, there was nothing they could do about it. He gave us some B.S. about Manitoba Health telling them that they were not supposed to do the test. He told us that the media has blown the whole WNV thing out of proportion, and that we shouldn't worry about it, because there are far more people who die every year from influenza (the Flu) than WNV! Unbelievable. By this time I was getting pretty ticked. My face was red, and my blood pressure must have been going through the roof. The symptoms were so similar, yet they refused to take her seriously and actually listen to what we were saying. Instead they insisted that it must be something else...lack of vitamins, muscle connective tissue disorders, pregnancy, thyroid, or something else. They did blood test for it all, and they ones we have the results for were all negative (we waited another hour while they did some of the tests in-house). The only tests we're still waiting for are for her thyroid and the WNV test. Those both have to be sent in to Winnipeg, and it will be a week or two before we find out the results. We both understood that even if it is WN, there is nothing they can do about it, but we need to know. West Nile can progress into West Nile Neurological Disorder which can damage all sorts of stuff,and can cause encephalitis (swelling of the brain). Not something I think you'd want to mess around with, but they didn't seem too concerned.

And so that's where things are right now.

- Warren