Hi all, my name is Emily and I'm new to this whole forum thing. I'm 20 years old, I'm a university student, and a runner. Lately, I've felt like introducing myself as a decrepit 20 year old, a failing university student, and a retired runner. In other words, I feel like crap.
7 weeks ago I started getting a headache in the back of my head. I've never had an issue with headaches in my life, so I noted it as strange. A week and a half later, the headache is still there and I'm in the emergency room because my doctor thinks I have meningitis. They do a CT (clear) but I refused the lumbar puncture - my job is physical, I can't take a day off.
They send me home with some naproxen, and a diagnosis of occipital neuralgia with a prescript
ion for massage therapy.
Every day, the headache is still there, and I start to connect the dots. I remember a time last summer when my left side of my body would go numb when I walked, my balance was off, and my muscles twitched painfully - it lasted for about
a month. I remember all the times my boyfriend has jokingly made fun of me for replacing random words, or for stuttering so much that I have to write the word down, like when I asked if he wanted to watch an episode of "the david's tea" instead of "the x files". I remember my memory loss, and my hair loss, and my unexplained pain, and my peripheral blurring, and my digestive issues.
7 weeks later and I've seen the doctor 6 times, been referred to a neurologist (the appointment is two weeks), been diagnosed with low iron and high TSH, but normal T4. My appetite is gone, I'm weak and twitchy, my speech is slurred, I have to use a thesaurus for every second word, the headache is still there, and I feel no closer to an answer.
The doctors have thrown around a lot of possibilities, like a pituitary tumour, meningitis (ruled out), celiac (ruled out), b12 deficiency (ruled out), complex migraines (ruled out), and MS, which at this point seems to be the primary thing they are considering. I've been seeing the massage therapist for 4 weeks, with no change in the headache, and no pain medication has helped as of yet (but I haven't tried narcotics - not going to either).
I guess the whole point of this long post is to see if anyone out there has had any sort of similar experience? I feel as though I'm at my ropes end here. I trust my doctors, and have faith that they will find an answer, but they haven't been able to give me any comfort, and that's what I think I need the most right now.
- Emily
Post Edited (resilienceandserenity) : 11/6/2013 8:38:41 PM (GMT-7)