Hi All, i am new to this site and i am sorry if the symptoms i am describing sound a bit minor to be worried about. It alll started last year when i started to get this numbness in my toes, eventually i realised they seem to go numb when the slights bit of cold. as soon as i warmed them up they seemed to be fine. this would happen on and off.
I then started to get this crawling feeling in my left arm which seemed to last about 6 weeks, i also had some dizziness which lasted about a month.
I have private medical insurance so i got referred to the nuffield by my gp and saw a neurologist who deals with ms who ran an mri of brain and spine. these all came back clear. 3 weeks after the scan i went to Turkey on holiday, this is because my husband is turkish, we go over every year but the strangest thing happened. as soon as i went out in the heat i would get this water drop sensation, it would drop on my head, shoulder, i thought my sons water bottle was dripping down my shoulder, when sitting in restuarants in the evenings i would get like what feels like sprays of water on my arms, the drops of water would land on my foot and everywhere, i have never felt this before and been to turkey lots of times.
I went back to see the neuro , he told me it was all anxiety, i have just been seen by another neoro through the nhs, he examined me and looked at my mri , he was at a loss as to what was the matter, this neuro is supposed to be one of the best in the uk apparently? i am so worried about this, i’m sorry if these symptoms seems really small but i am so worried this is MS does this sound like it to you? Many thanks in advance
This is probably the single commonest question we get on this forum, so I sometimes feel as if I should have a pre-prepared answer, to save all the typing, but that would not be very friendly or personal, so here goes:
The problem is that similar symptoms can be caused by over 100 different things, so nobody on a forum can tell you if they are caused by MS in your case.
Yes, they could be attributable to MS, but there’s nothing about them that means they must be. I don’t think there’s any symptom that can only ever be MS, and is never caused by anything else. If there was, diagnosis would be easy - which, as you probably know by now, either from personal experience or browsing through the posts - it’s not.
Although it is possible for early stage MS not to show on MRI, a clear MRI of both brain and spine does make MS rather less of a candidate. Rest assured that if it was MS, which for some reason was just not showing up on scans yet, it wouldn’t go undetected forever. In general, the longer you’ve had symptoms, the more likely something would show; it doesn’t stay invisible indefinitely. So if you continued to have symptoms, and they continued to monitor, they would find it, eventually.
However, for the moment, I would try to take reassurance from the fact initial scans have not shown MS to be likely. I know that doesn’t mean it’s 100% ruled out, and it’s still frustrating to have no answers about what else it might be, but your scans haven’t shown the classic signs.
Have you had blood tests to check for things like vitamin deficiencies?
thank you for replying. I have had all the bloods done, vit d normal, b12 normal ect ect.
It was just the water drop thing that bothered me the most. Because this seemed to happen in the heat it made me worried this could be something to do with ‘heat intolerence’ but my neuro said it doesn’t present like this. Is this correct?
the neuro also said you can see MS coming on a brain scan even before somebody has even had symptoms.?
thank you for replying. I have had all the bloods done, vit d normal, b12 normal ect ect.
It was just the water drop thing that bothered me the most. Because this seemed to happen in the heat it made me worried this could be something to do with ‘heat intolerence’ but my neuro said it doesn’t present like this. Is this correct?
the neuro also said you can see MS coming on a brain scan even before somebody has even had symptoms.?