Dr. Pearl

We had our first official appointment with Dr. Pearl today and now we have a doctor again! Since this is the 5th neurologist we've taken Evan to, we pretty much have this initial meeting thing down. He spent an hour and a half with us (which is our norm even though the appointments are supposed to be an hour) and he did his best to answer all our questions. The more neurologists we meet, the more we realize what an unknown science neurology is! There are so many mysteries surrounding the brain, seizures and seizure medications and a lot of our questions were answered with "That's a great question." At least we're not asking bad questions! This is by no means a criticism of Dr. Pearl and we were impressed with him overall. But basically there are so many things medical science just hasn't figured out yet in this area.

Evan had a little anxiety about being in another doctor's office and is growing leery of all medical personnel. He was pretty stressed about being there which made things a little challenging, but he had a seizure in front of Dr. Pearl, which was probably a good thing. That's the first time a doctor has seen him have a seizure, but it happened so fast Dr. Pearl barely had a chance to check it out.

So, the game plan isn't much different and we're going to pursue seizure controlling meds while following a possible surgical path and having some testing done to determine if he has TS or not. Dr. Pearl said Evan is doing so well in every other area that it's hard to think about brain surgery and doesn't feel we need to rush into a decision in that area. We like his approach so far and it's good to hear another doctor say that we can take our time deciding about surgery.

On that note, Dr. Pearl was impressed that we had gotten into see Dr. Bruce for a neurosurgery consult and declared him to be the best pediatric neurosurgeon for epilepsy in the world. These sound like pretty high marks, and he is familiar with the stiff competition so if this is where we end up, we'll press for more info as to why he feels this way. But for now I think we feel pretty good about the doctors we are working with.