My daughter and encephalitis

This is an entry I Posted last August and I would like to add some updates at the end:

My 8 year old daughter was diagnosed with encephalitis in Sept. 2007. All the available tests were run to check for the cause, but they all came back negative. The doctors just left it as " a probable unknown virus" and sent her to rehab. While in Atlanta for intensive rehab for 2 months her brain functions seemed to be getting worse. She started out with short term memory loss but then her language skills started declining. Now she has a vocabulary of about 15 words that she repeats over and over. As this was going on I was doing online research and found out that there is a connection between thyroid problems and encephalitis. I thought that had to be it since I have thyroid issues on both sides of my family. In fact, my thyroid hormones caused problems during my pregnancies raising the heartrate of the fetus ending in one still-born and one child two months premature. I took her to the Mayo Clinic since I wasn't getting answers through her regular doctors. A simple test found her Thyroid antibodies (TPO) extremely high. Sometimes this causes an autoimmune disorder and attacks parts of the body - in her case, her brain. They call this Hashimoto's Encephalitis or Steroid responsive Encephalitis. Steroids have helped reduce the antibody level, but we haven't seen much improvement with her mentally. She started IVIG treatments but we're still seeing little progress. I'm not sure what the next step will be but I just can't accept that this is permanent damage. Please, if anyone out there knows of a situation similar to Sydney's, please give me any advise. I also have a journal with the whole story on caringbridge.org -you can go to the site and type in sydneyfthompson -who knows, maybe there is some valuable information there for others.
Thank you
Jayme

4 months ago I took Sydney to the Dominican Republic for stem cell treatment. I have seen some small changes. For about a month her hyper-activity has gone through the roof though. I hope this is a by-product of activity going on in her brain. I'm trying to stay patient and will update with any improvements.