Hi guys, how are you all doing? I'm a 21 year old male in college and my health has been pretty messed up since the beginning of October. It all started at the beginning of a night of drinking with my friends. I had a few drinks (nothing compared to my tolerance) and started feeling extremely weird - chest pain, blurred vision, etc. The next morning I woke up and my symptoms persisted. They developed into intense flu-like symptoms a few weeks later, but the flu symptoms eventually passed and have not really returned. I've been in and out of doctors - chest x-ray, gastrointestinal x-ray with barium, tons of bloodwork, stool sample, went to an eye doctor, etc. I've also been told that my symptoms [symptoms below] are entirely due to anxiety and have been put on meds that I really should have nothing to do with. At certain points, I've really gotten the feeling that I'm going crazy and I really don't have anything, but the symptoms persist.
Then I stumbled onto the canadian lyme disease foundation's website (http://www.canlyme.com/patsymptoms.html) and I was literally floored by all the symptoms I have. I have 47/76 conservatively and 20 is enough to look into it, apparently. Here are the symptoms from the list that I'm experiencing, with my clarifications:
- Unexplained hair loss
- Headache, localized and general & Migraines
- Pressure in head
- Twitching of muscles
- Stiff/painful neck
- Jaw pain
- Dental problems (take really good care of my teeth but gums are pretty bad currently)
- Sore throat, comes and goes
- Double/blurry vision DESPITE perfect eye health
- Increased floaters, lots of squigglies
- Oversensitivity to all light
- Decreased hearing
- Oversensitivity to sounds
- RINGING IN MY RT. EAR
- Occasional diarrhea
- Excessive urination
- Nausea / stomach acid incr
- Bone pain/Joint pain - I feel like I'm 80
- Stiffness of joints - a lot of popping lately
- Muscle pain
- Shortness of breath randomly sometimes
- Chest pain&rib soreness
- Night sweats/chills
- Heartbeat loud randomly
- Shaking! hands very shaky, whole body goes through shaking episodes sometime
- Fatigue/weakness - daily tasks are so hard
- Tingling/pins in hands/feets
- Poor balance - catch myself tipping too often
- Incr motion sickness - thought I got over it in childhood..
- Lightheaded constantly
- Disorientation - my navigational sense is amazing...now i get lost
- Feeling as if I'm losing my mind
- Insomnia, bouts of
- Difficulty falling&staying asleep every night
- Panic attacks, anxiety - never experienced them before October
- Memory loss!
- Confusion/difficulty in thinking
- Difficulty concentrating, esp. reading/conversations
- Going to wrong place, constantly lol
- Weight loss
- Swollen lymph nodes in beginning
- Unexplainable random fevers
- CONTINUAL INFECTIONS - everything takes forever to heal & I've had staph, MRSA staph, & general bacterial infections
- Symptoms seem to change, come and go
- Pain moves to many different parts of body
- Early on, experienced flu-like illness that went away - see above
- Lower body temp - I used to be a much warmer person, maybe its the weight loss tho
- Increase effect from alcohol/worse hangovers - very true & apparent in the college setting
Additionally, the bulk of these symptoms give me a prevailing sense of derealization; I can feel pretty disconnected from reality a lot of the time. My motivation seems to have plummeted to the lowest levels of my life; I manage to get everything I need to do done, but it takes a ridiculous amount of effort sometimes.
Despite all this, I am pretty happy most of the time. I manage to spend a lot of time with my friends and keep up a pretty strong facade of normality. I still get to do a lot of the things I love in life. So I have a really hard time seeing how it's entirely anxiety related.
Where I'm currently at: I last suggested an MRI to my doctor at Student Health and he gave me an extremely passive aggressive reply that was essentially "we can, but you're an idiot and wasting your money". [Same doctor that said an ESR rules out Lyme...] So I have done nothing for the past few weeks. I currently have a week back home in the Bay Area, and would really like to take some steps towards ridding myself of whatever this.
So, what do you guys think? What should I do? I really need some direction here, maybe the name of a good LLMD? Should I just go into therapy for anxiety, are the doctors right?
I really appreciate your guys' time. Thanks a ton. I hope you all get well soon, too.
EDIT: It's also worth noting that I've been hiking up in the mountains behind my house in shorts & a t-shirt since I was little, without fail. I've had two discovered tick bites, but none very recently. Yes, I know I'm an idiot.
Post Edited (Stay_Fresh) : 3/19/2011 2:01:30 PM (GMT-6)