Day 23 post-IVIG I cried on my way into work yesterday. This is not an unusual occurrence, as my fellow PANDAS and autism moms know. What was unusual is that I was crying tears of happiness. This has not happened in some time. I cried about tomatoes. (That Lady Gaga song "The Cure" coming on my XM didn't help. See tear inducing lyrics below. The song is definitely not about mom healing her kid, but it gets me anyway) We had noticed over the past week that Max's flare was endi

Day 10 post-IVIG The battle with the Bear rages on. New PANDAS symptoms have appeared. I'm pretty sure he's had every possible one at this point. Ones I never thought we'd see. It gets worse before it gets better. Max is so good at pretending everything is fine. He allowed us to fool ourselves for years. When the family is stressed (which is pretty constant at our house for a lot of reasons) Max responds by trying to be the kid who has no problems. He helps with the little on

My son Max keeps track of his stats. No, not baseball or grade point average. A different kind. The kind brought by the Bear. 44 tubes of blood drawn in the past few months, 15 specialists he saw before he got the right diagnosis, 7 pokes looking for veins to get the treatment he needs. He got his IVIG last week. The first 4 pokes came looking to put in his IV for treatment. The poor kid inherited his mothers terrible, tricky veins. We were trying for the hand because the IV