MND has been pretty much confirmed

A couple of months before last Xmas (2016) my wife asked me a number of times if I was noticing anything wrong with her speech. At that time I couldn't. But as Xmas approached I did start to notice a slight slurring; the pronunciations were not quite right. So we organised a visit with her GP, who in turn—due to spotting some slight quivering with my wife's tongue—decided to refer her to a neurologist.

The appointment with the neurologist was in the first week of January, 2017. After a number blood tests to rule out some other possibilities, an MRI brain scan (to rule out a stroke or any such similar), and some nerve tests at the second appointment (which included sticking a very fine pin in her tongue), he provisionally diagnosed motor neuron disease (MND) or, as it is known in America, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

The neurologist referred us to an MND specialist. I won't go into the huge story behind actually getting to see the MND specialist here (maybe in a later post), but we didn't get to see such a specialist for a number of months after the referral.

When we finally got to see the MND specialist she ran two more blood tests to rule out myasthenia gravis (MG) and something else that I cannot remember the name of. After about two months these tests, which apparently have to be sent to the east coast and take some time to process, were back and were both negative—leaving us with MND now at about a 95% certainty.

So, probably sometime in May we were faced with the most likely fact that my wife had the progressive bulbar palsy (PSP) version of motor neuron disease (MND)—i.e., PSP/MND.