Hi there everyone. I’m new to this site and this is my first post, so please bare with me and apologies if this goes on a bit!
As the topic title states, I have my first appointment with a neurologist this coming week after finally being sent to one by my GP. I’ve basically had 7 years of feeling unwell, to varying degrees. Good days, good weeks, good months to poor days, poor weeks, poor months. You get the idea. It all started with a really bad cold and to be honest, I’ve never felt 100% from that moment on. What followed were eye sight problems (white dots, flashes, blurred vision), bowel and stomach problems (recently been diagnosed with GERD with a sliding hernia), bladder problems (needing to go to the toilet very often to hardly going at all), depression (mood swings), weakness and numbness (legs and arms), extreme fatigue (to the point where I’m struggling to get out of bed), a recent development of motion sickness (has happened on 4 occasions in two years after long journeys. I’d never suffered before this), heat intolerance (get warm and start burning up very easily and then take ages to get back to a normal body temp), a strange feeling in my legs like they’re getting covered in running water and just generally feeling unwell. Another thing I’ve noticed is that I appear to get extremely drunk, very quickly. I’m talking falling over, down stairs, being very unsteady on my feet etc. This is not me at all and has only started happening in the past 12 months or so. My symptoms are always 10 x worse the following day too. Due to all this, I’ve stopped heavy drinking altogether as it’s just too scary the days after and embarrassing on the actual night.
The main problem has been that I only ever suffer from 2 or 3 of these symptoms at any one time, so my GP has just been sending me to various specialists who’ve found virtually nothing wrong with me. Very frustrating when you know there is something wrong, as I’m sure all of you can relate to. I’ve had so many blood tests that have all come back normal or negative (HIV, full immune system check, CBC etc etc) along with endescopys, CT scans, xrays, ultrasounds, stool samples, sputum samples, breathing tests…again all normal.
At the moment I’m regularly suffering from respiritory problems (shallow breathing, fast breathing, heavy chest, coughing up phlegm) along with dizzyness, numbness in legs and feet and feeling like I’m going to fall over or collapse… I was sent to a chest specialist in August who, after sending me for chest xrays, CT chest scan and a whole load of blood tests again (full immune system check), could find nothing at all wrong. He said there wasn’t even anything worth exploring further. So back to my GP i went and she decided to send me to a neurologist to explore “possible Multiple Sclerosis”.
So this is the stage I’m at now. After finding this website, I thought it would be worth posting to see if anyone else has had to go through a similar thing to me and what to maybe expect when seeing the neurologist? Am I likely to be waiting more months to get a diagnosis, or will it be a bit quicker due to the amount of things they’ve already ruled out?
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read this and please fire away any questions or info you might think are relevant. It’s also good to know this forum exists as it’s very difficult to talk about this to family and friends, before getting a confirmed diagnosis.