Voting for the vapors

Last month, we brought my daughter C. back to the epileptologist who first examined her in September 2018.

At that first visit, this  doctor patiently recorded C's history as we related it. She then recommended several new tests and treatment options. We left her office feeling optimistic.

But once we tried to implement her advice, we hit snags. The primary one was our inability to contact her staff. They never returned calls or emails and without coordinating everything with them we couldn't proceed.

I was prepared to just forget about this epileptologist notwithstanding her superb credentials but the Hubby preferred to persevere.

So last week we expended a second round of time, energy and money to shlep back to her with C. As it turned out, the latter proved entirely unnecessary: the doctor didn't so much as look at C., let alone touch or medically examine her - even when she had a huge seizure in the office.

One of her concerns back in September was C.'s low weight. This time she asked us whether she had gained at all since our last visit. But she didn't trouble to weigh her on either occasion. C. might as well have been invisible and our efforts to bring her to the office were clearly unnecessary.

I was disappointed and annoyed. What do you all think? Am I quibbling?

This time around, her assistant did contact us a few days after the appointment, as the doctor had promised. She is instructing us on how to switch Cannabis CBD suppliers. This is a complicated process involving reams of paperwork required by the relevant government department.

The switch is necessary in order to procure CBD in vapor form which the epileptologist believes is absorbed more thoroughly than the oil C. currently receives.

To start with, we will divide dose between the two forms.

But this option was not the epileptologist's first choice. What she plugged most enthusiastically was surgery. She is keen to have C.'s twenty year old, inactive Vagal Nerve Stimulator (VNS) removed and replaced with an updated, more sophisticated version.

We had this urged on us three years ago by another neurologist: the one who destroyed Chaya's liver with Valproic Acid and then, when we notified her of the liver crisis, washed her hands of us. So, I'm sure you'll understand why I don't harbor any positive feelings for that option.

Back then, we even met with the surgeon himself. He informed us that the surgery would be "complicated" but doable. He too was eager, though he warned us that he would only proceed once C. gained some weight.

Before C. could oblige us that way, liver failure struck and the neurologist who had been touting the VNS surgery, as I mentioned, fled the scene. (After making the preposterous assertion that the liver failure had probably been triggered by the CBD and not by the Valproic Acid!)

Fast forward to last week's visit: I've had a couple of years to mull that surgical option and am far less enamored with it than I was then. C. has been through the liver ordeal and several severe urinary tract infections in the interim. What kind of candidate for surgery does all that make her?

So this time, I pressed hard on the brakes. "Thanks, but no thanks." I told the epileptologist. "C. will try the CBD vapors before we subject her to any complicated surgery." Or something to that effect.

Of course, the doctor tried to convince me of its "uncomplicatedness". But I wasn't buying it this time.

Here's hoping those vapors deliver C.'s ravaged brain a bit of respite from the decades of daily seizures she has endured.