intellectual properties

symptomatic

the long overdue health report is that since i’ve been back from burning man, i’ve been experiencing some moderate to severe physical symptoms that are vague yet consistent. these include: dizziness, vertigo, weakness, fatigue, strange burning/tingling sensations in my head and up and down my extremities, nerve tweaks/spasms, vision funkiness, pressure in my head, and sometimes nausea.

a few weeks ago i went to see my general physician and she didn’t have much to say – such vague symptoms without anything really “happening”, she couldn’t give me a diagnosis other than i should literally and figuratively get my head checked: revisit a neurologist, given my history of seizures (which were never attributed to anything specific being wrong), and possibly a psychologist/psychiatrist, to see about my anxiety.

after looking at my old records and giving me a few tests and asking a few pertinent questions, the neurologist also figures it’s generalized anxiety, as i don’t actually have what one would call a “headache” (suggesting a scary problem like a brain tumor), and my cognitive functions have remained just fine (suggesting i haven’t had any seizures), but with the continuing persistence of symptoms i am having the MRI and EEGs done again next week.

at the end of last week i thought i was getting better, that every day i was feeling a bit stronger, and i was feeling 90% ok. but then saturday came, and i spent the whole day weak and trembly, and since then i’ve felt horrid.

this has been more or less occupying most of my time, dealing with this, and has kept me from doing a lot of things, being a lot of places, writing a lot of blogs. i’ve been able to function at work just fine, although i’m probably a bit more irritable and surly than i should be, and i’ve tried to go on with my life as though everything is fine, which is maybe the worst thing to do, not ignoring the problem but not letting it take over my life. but everywhere i go, i am monitoring all these strange sensations in my body. when i walk down the street for lunch, i wonder if i’ll fall to my knees. when i’m sitting in a theatre seeing a play, i feel weak and wonder what would happen if i lost consciousness. like the world is so heavy, and my life force so weak, that i just might collapse under the weight of it all. i have also had a couple of standard anxiety attacks – the sweaty palms, the difficulty breathing – but these other symptoms are pretty much nonstop. all day long. the weakness and dizziness, and weird pressure/tingling in my head. i haven’t fallen, i haven’t lost consciousness, but it constantly feels like i might.

it’s so hard to write this here, i don’t know why. maybe because i don’t want to hear everyone’s advice or seem like i’m asking for sympathy. or maybe because it feels like i am overreacting, and putting this into writing here, for everyone to read, feels like making a mountain out of a molehill, exaggerating my symptoms. are they really as bad as they seem? or am i just being hypersensitive? maybe because its so personal, and when things are really deep, really personal, i am usually silent, and this seems like a lot of myself to share. or maybe because regardless of what is or what isn’t, i’m fucking scared.

i knew i was scared when i realized i hadn’t cried. for the past 3 weeks, even though i’ve spent nearly every day feeling sick, wondering what is wrong, how it is going to affect the rest of my life, what i will need to do, terrified of some of the possibilities, scheduling all kinds of doctor appointments, i had not, until this morning, shed a single tear, which is unusual for me. i cry when i get stressed. this is so beyond stressed that i haven’t even been able to cry. when i called jay to talk about scheduling another MRI this morning, i finally cried for a minute, but it was a brief respite in feeling, well, sort of paralyzed.

in preparing for these visits i have revisited my medical records from 2000, when i first had seizures, and the MRI report states that there was at that time “hippocampal atrophy” and “assymetry in the temporal lobe”. at the time these were dismissed as “normal abnormalities”, i guess you could say. in looking up recently articles in medical journals on the subject, i found that both of these things are related to mood disorders, particularly depression, and also, interestingly, this:

While BHA (Bilateral symmetrical hippocampal atrophy) does not result in an increased prevalence of specific psychiatric syndromes, specific symptoms that characterize the Geschwind syndrome like hypergraphia and hyposexuality might be pathogenically related to hippocampal atrophy.

Geschwind syndrome, also known as Waxman-Geschwind syndrome or “Gastaut-Geschwind” is a characteristic personality syndrome consisting of symptoms such as circumstantiality (excessive verbal output, stickiness, hypergraphia), altered sexuality (usually hyposexuality, meaning a decreased interest), and intensified mental life (deepened cognitive and emotional responses), hyper-religiosity and/or hyper-morality or moral ideas, that is present in some epilepsy patients.

Hypergraphia is an overwhelming urge to write. It is not itself a disorder, but can be associated with temporal lobe changes in epilepsy and mania in the context of bipolar disorder.

i know it’s dangerous to self-diagnose and look up symptoms on the internet, but, um…..huh. interesting. i don’t think i’ve been experiencing much actual mania in my waking life, but last week i had two very vivid dreams in which i was extremely manic and woken up with the feeling of having experienced mania.

anyway, for now, all i know is that the new neurologist also thinks it’s anxiety, which i guess is good news, and it does manifest itself in a myriad of forms, but my symptoms are not exactly the same as those generally associated with that problem. this is not something that builds up over the course of a stressful day, or the result of thinking about particularly stressful things, or lasts for a short period of time. my body wakes up immediately feeling this way, i go to bed feeling this way. pretty much the only time i DON’T feel the symptoms, or at least to a much lesser degree, is after i’ve had a few glasses of wine, which, you know, is a sedative, so maybe it is “just” anxiety (although i hate using the word “just”). still, to cover all bases, i am having bloodwork done this week to determine if i have some sort of deficiency or infection, and because although it may just be paranoia, i do feel like something weird is going on in my head/brain, i am having MRI and EEGs in the next 2 weeks to relook at my brain. at the very least it’s highly possible that i will, despite all resistance against, have to go back on medications, either for anxiety or depression or seizures or all.

the messed up thing is that i almost WANT the doctors to find something, otherwise this was all just….me. freaking out. i know that anxiety/depression are biological disorders as much as they are mental, and not your “fault” if you suffer from such things, but just the same i feel like i’m waiting to find out whether i’m sick, or just crazy. and i think i’d rather be sick. (i know “crazy” is not a PC mental health term, but you get the jist.)

in the meantime i’m trying to relax (as well as get a lot of aerobic exercise, which is supposed to help, but getting a lot of exercise when you feel really weak and exhausted most of the time is rather tough), but it seems pretty much impossible for me at this point. i was expecting this to go away; i thought i was just exhausted/dehydrated from burning man and stressed out from coming back to face the being robbed and thinking about moving and shit, but here i am 3 weeks later, still feeling this way, wondering why and thinking the worst, although logically i know i probably just need a lot of R&R and to maybe make some life changes to get rid of some stress (like moving to a nicer neighborhood). still, i have purposely scheduled my doctor appointments for AFTER our rescheduled-due-to-wildfires party in the mountains this weekend, because even though i’ll still be worried while there, if i’m going to hear some bad news, i’d like to at least enjoy the party first.

Filed in autobiographical, epilepsy, food, health & vegetarianism, me myself and i, most linked/commented on | Tagged with anxiety | Comments (12)