Time to see a Doctor.

Once school began in September, I continued to notice the excess saliva, drooling out of the left side of my mouth and also a lot of spitting when I was directing my students. I also noticed difficulty getting words out....ot that I couldn't think of the word, but that my mouth wasn't getting the words out. I thought it was just my own hypochondriac worries. Sometime in November of 2008, I made an appointment with our family doctor to discuss several things with him. I was having some testicular pain that concerned me and I also wanted to bring up some of the other symptoms that were going on. Dr. James Carlson has emerged in recent months as "in my words" the new Dr. Atkins. He wrote a book about how we are all killing ourselves by eating carbs. Although I know I could never do a low carb diet, I respect him as he has much training in molecular biology and seems to understand nutrition. I met with him and we discussed consulting a urologist. The main focus of our discussion was my weight loss and his views on nutrition as it relates to a low carb diet. He gave me the whole spiel and I listened intently, wanting to learn more about this and his opinions. He was proud of me for my weight loss and suggested changing my lifestyle even more for optimum health. He prescribed that I get blood tests to make sure that my levels were within range since the weight loss. He also encouraged me to get an echocardiogram to check the status of a previously diagnosed "leaky heart valve". Toward the end of our conversation, I told him about the excess saliva and the, spitting when I speak and the difficulty getting words out of my mouth. Dr. Carlson felt that this was most likely due to allergies and he directed me to get some allegra. Even though I knew this wasn't an allergy, I went to BJ's and got a large bottle of allegra and started taking it and as expected there was no change.