David Ball

David was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis in November 2010. This diease is a Neuro Muscular Auto Immune Diease.  It took a while for the doctors to stabilize his diease stabilize, but they did and it was stabilized until somewhere in the middle of 2015. The treatments that the doctors were doing began to not work for very long periods of time. He went into Myasthenia crisis in April of 2016 and was hospitalized in ICU for a week. then went into crisis again in June 2016 and was hospitalized - ICU again for a week.  The doctors started doing plasmaphereisis and this work for a while and then they had to start giving him this treatment more often.  In early 2017 His Neurologist recommended that he get his Thymus gland removed.  He had to be tapered off his steroids and off steroids for a month before the  surgeon would do the surgery. He had is thymectomy June 6,2017.  Since his surgery he has not been stable.  it is August 2017 and since his surgery he has been in ICU 4 times, he has been to the ER 3 times, where they discharged him and then he would go straight up to the dialysis room and get plasmaphereisis. The treatment would work for a couple of days and then he would be  in crisis again. On July 29,2017 he went into crisis again and instead of phorisis they did IVIG, which is what his treatments were for the first 4 years until they weren't working any longer.  The IVIG brought him out of crisis slightly but there was not enough of an improvement to where he was getting better. The doctors did not know what to do because his blood counts were going down and so they decided to send him up to OHSU. He was flown up on  August 2, 2017. He was in Neuro ICU and has had great care. The team of doctors and specialists are working hard to get him stable. he has been moved to a new floor and room. There has been slight improvement but he is a long ways from being stable.  I will update more later.