I hate having to be House...

So in continuation from my previous post, my granfather's strange spells continued and got worse even after stopping the pred and the atropine. The last episode being coughing, shortness of breath, slurred speech, dizziness, and was again relieved by nitroglycerin.

Now I did some more research and realized that stroke is not really relieved by nitro..and the shortness of breath and coughing, as well as symptoms relieved by nitro is more likely to be related to a heart problem, the only thing that didn't add up was the slurred speech....

So a bit more research and what I realized was that the glaucoma eye drops that he was prescribed to decrease his IOP, are actually vasoconstrictors......and in cases where the person has pre-existing heart conditions can cause worsening angina and even heart attacks.....

It finally makes sense, the slurred speech was most likely related to the vasoconstriction of blood vessels in the brain. The drops caused the vasoconstriction which then caused decreased blood flow and decreased oxygen and thereby caused the slurred speech.

In fact, there is a warning to carefully prescribe these drops to people with heart issues. The interesting thing is that most likely all doctors that we go to will deny this and say there is no effect whatsoever, and that something else is causing the symptoms.

So now we are sort of stuck with a dilemma, is the glaucoma a bigger problem than a heart attack?

To most people the answer is simple, since he already doesn't have any vision in his eye anyway and was living with this condition for 3+ years and we've managed to stabilize it, what's the point of treating it right? I mean the reduced IOP is definitely not worth the (higher) risk of a heart attack. Now if only we could find a doctor to whom we could actually explain things to and possibly find a solution...yeah that's a fantasy.

There are other options available such as laser treatment which was fairly effective when it was done the one time, but now we'll need to find a new optho since the old one basically kicked us out. Surgery is another option but there are too many complications.

So now we're back to where we were before, me trying to be House and figure out the causes of the severe symptoms that he's experiencing and whether they could be side effects from the medication and how to manage them. At the same time not having a doctor with whom we can actually figure out what we're supposed to do to decrease his IOP yet not have a heart attack at the same time. Yep I love the medical system.