Erica and I are back in Illinois! It’s good to be home.

On Thursday we were able to get into all of our appts including our return appt with the neurologist! God moved so many mountains that day…thank you for your prayers!

Erica has been diagnosed with something known as a general Functional Movement Disorder. A functional movement disorder means that there is abnormal movement of the body due to the nervous system not working properly but not due to an underlying neurological disease. In essence something in her brain is triggering these uncontrollable movements. If caught early (which hers have been) Mayo has a specialized therapy program that works to retrain the brain. The doctors feel if we can give the intense therapy program a full week, there’s a good chance they can turn this around.

What causes this? They said in 50% of the cases, they can link FMD to stress. In the other 50% of the cases they cannot find a cause. Based upon their evaluation, hers does not seem to be stress-related. Even when the movements are caused by stress, removal of the stress doesn’t change the movements. Once the brain is triggering…it’s hard to get it to stop. Thus the hard work of a comprehensive therapy program using multiple kinds of therapy is valuable.

So…we hope to go back before then end of June for her week-long therapy program. They said she’ll have to work hard…but she says she’s ready. They can’t promise that the movements are stopped with therapy in 100% of the cases. But they said the chances of successful therapy increase when it is started within months of onset. Erica’s movements started in March so they feel she has a good chance.

Thank you so much for your prayers. This week we saw God work incredible miracles and we know it was because we had so many people praying. We got into appointments that should have taken us weeks to get into.

It was definitely a faith-strengthening week for both of us!