Short term memory / tingles across body / feeling withdrawn

My name is Lee and I live in the South East of England in Kent.

I am hoping and preying that you may be able to help me, for the past 5 -6 months I have not felt myself at all, even though to other people I seem normal.

This is certainly been the most worrying and stressful time of my life and I just don't know where to go or what to do, I will try and explain my symptoms in the best way that I can.

I feel like the way in which I now see the outside world has changed, my view and sight of things seem different even though they look the same, its very hard to explain but I can only describe that its almost like everyday I am looking in from the outside, this has co-insided with difficulty with my short term memory being very poor as well, in the past few days my eye sight seems to be different, lots of ghosting and my vision seems a little blurry at times and i have tingles across my hands feet, legs and arms.

Things I did yesterday or this morning seem like they took place 6 or seven weeks ago and I find it very very hard to recall what I did at a weekend when I get to Monday or Tuesday even at the end of the day I am struggling to work out what I have done or where I have been, things seem to be getting worse and I am very worried and frightened that this could be early signs  of dementia or MS, but is this possible at the age of 29?

I have had a MRI Scan two months ago and that came back as clear, I run my own business and was very stressed with it about 6/7 months  ago  but I do not feel stressed now at all and want to just in enjoy my life but this is really holding me back .

I have run my own recruitment business for the past  3  years, having started it on my own at the age of 25/26, at the beginning of this year I went through one of the most stressful periods of my life with issues regarding ownership, which I did get very stressed by to the point of it dominating everything I did, but that was a long time ago now. about 6 moths before that I went through a phase of covering up gambling debts and although I have completely stopped that now, it was a very traumatic time for me, again I don't think this is relevant to now but I want to give you as much information as possible, I also had a MRI Scan on my back 4 years ago which highlighted a prolapsed disk and I have never had any surgery to correct it because although it is sometimes uncomfortable, I can put up with it and it has got much much better now through time.

I feel like I am going mad and the memory loss is frightening the life out of me, I have been taking B12,B6 and Folic Acid for 2 weeks and things don't seem to have improved, I am getting some tingles in my feet and hands and face at certain times but not all the time.

How or why has my memory become so bad and why do I feel like my existent of who I was or am is disappearing, because that is what I am feeling, I have been searching across the net and doing as much research as I can ( I know that's not always a good idea ) and I feel that it could be the following things:

Early signs of dementia

Information overload

Some type of Brain Fog

Early signs of MS ( no family history )

A delayed Stress Breakdown???

Signs of a Stroke although MRI was clear 2 months ago  

Any help advice or any ideas I would be so grateful l for,  I just want to get on with my life but this is really dominating everything I do and I just want to try and find some answers.

I have some tests on Friday to look at how my reasoning and memory , if that comes back okay then I really don't know what to do.

Your site made very interesting reading and any advice or help you can give me I would be eternally grateful for, I would desricbe my personality as driven, very caring and thoughtful of others if that helps anything.

Your advice or any help you can give me is much appreciated.

Hi Lee,

I was diagnosed with MS in 2003 and have been dealing with stress related fatigue for over 17 years now. I am not a doctor so I am purely speaking from my own experience.

Yes, it is possible that you have MS but since none of the testing thus far has shown positive for it there's not much you can do but wait for symptoms to change or increase and/or keep having testing done.

How big is your workload? If you often work overtime that could be contributing to your symptoms. I mean if you've had large amounts of stress in the last two years and you continued to work a lot during recovery from the stressful events, that could be part of your problem. Depending on the stressful event it can take a long time to recover and if you have been working a lot even during the stressful times, you're not giving your body enough downtime to recover.

If you do caffeine just to function, it is a pretty good clue that your body is overtaxed and can't cope with the past or present stress in a normal healthy manner. Your body automatically takes care of the most important functions like breathing and organ function and other non life supporting things get neglected because your body can't take care of everything. 

The best thing you can do until you get an answer for your symptoms is to rest as much as possible and limit stressful events as much as possible.

I hope this helps you at least on some level and you feel better very soon.

Penny