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| A CLIPPER on Holiday |
Wales
I've been enjoying the last of the Summer sun in South Wales. The day after we arrived we climbed Corn Du and Pen Y Fan in the Brecon Beacons National Park. I looked at my watch and noticed it was exactly one year to the day since I was discharged from the NHNN with a bag full of pills and a diagnosis of presumptive CLIPPERS. My balance had improved after 5 days of IV steroids but was still not great. I also still had double vision and some strange intermittent jerkiness when walking or talking. A fuller account of those times is here. Now I have a smaller bag of pills and the various symptoms are pretty much resolved. From what I can gather I've had a good result from treatment but this is largely down to the luck of being in the right place at the right time and getting a diagnosis relatively quickly. CLIPPERS is tricky to identify and other things need to be excluded, but equally, it doesn't seem to get better by itself and needs treating. I was definitely in slow decline before and during my time in hospital but the pills are working for now.
CLIPPERS News
The debate about possible mechanisms for CLIPPERS continues. A short response to the paper by Dr Ortega (describing CLIPPERS as a complication of Multiple Sclerosis) has recently appeared. I don't pretend to understand the detail of the argument but more discussion about possible causes can only be a good thing and may eventually lead to firmer diagnostic criterion.
Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.
Living With CLIPPERS by Bill Crum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
