Posted 11/6/2010 3:00 AM (GMT 0)
I originally came to "HealingWell.com" looking for a Cronic Fatigue support group for a friend currently with C/F in Pass Christian.
about 30 years ago, I'd had a self-diagnosed case of C/F for perhaps eight years, two of them very bad. This is when many physicians said there was no such thing. I found a C/F support group in nearby Biloxi called "Positive Fibronites" for my friend.
However my continuing interest will concern what I've had acutely for 15 or more years (age 68 now), Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS). I'm a long-time member of a wonderful group, the Restless Leg Syndrome Foundation, headquarter Rochester, MN 55901. I believe I'm permitted to post it's website: www.rls.org It publishes a quality 24 page journal, "Night Walkers". I take 20 carbidopa-levodopa 25-100 TAB per day; plus four gabapentin 300 MG capsule GRE. One physician warned, "You can still get Parkinson's, RSL is not the same thing." I said at 20 Parkinson's pills per day for RLS, how would I ever know I had Parkinson's?
Even when bad, my RLS attacks are usually limited to below the waist (but not always), and more pronounced on the right side. When I first had RLS in milder form; not even then knowing I had a medically recognized symptom, I called it "Fidgety Feet" and though it unique to myself. A newspaper report alerted me to RLS. I took a copy to my General Practitioner physician; he said he never heard of it, but he was thereafter helpful.
The first medicine I was on was Requip which controlled the RLS as well as my present drug; however it seem to cause me to fall asleep when stopped at intersection red-lights and briefly for less than two weeks, occasional one-second nod-offs, fortunately always on straight sections of roads. It took me several days before I was aware I was even doing one-second "sleeps". When I was in Navy boot-camp in 1961 and we recruits always lacked sleep; in the class room they used WWII 16mm training films, brittle with use and age (like me now). More than one place on the film; one, two, or three frames of broken film re-spliced would be missing, and the film scene would suddenly jump ahead. If it was a tank driver, he'd suddenly be 50-feet farther down the road; that's what the one-second sleeps seemed like when I final became suspicious, then aware it was happening.
I do not know why what caused my acute RLS. I suspect it may be from DoD work inside F-4 Phantom (great airplane) center-line, under-fuselage fuel drop-tanks, me inside breathing and seemingly passing through my gloves: MEK? A later civil airline employer would not let MEK be on it's premises. But I know of know proven connection between MEK and RLS? Besides RLS, cancer also caused my early retirement, but it seemingly was successfully surgically removed; with azure skies aloft, yet awaiting!
*Note: On old-time large sailing ships; there allegedly were only 13 "ropes" to be learned, all the rest being called "lines". It's quicker to teach a new land-lubber recruit the just 13 "ropes", vs. teaching him (in those days, hims) over a hundred lines. "Knowing the ropes", meant one was less than totally ignorant. Of course a frog that did not yet know what a frog was; was likely toadedly ignorant, too?