HI All,
I am new here and this is my first post.
Does anyone else get the feeling that some people think your a hypochondriac?
Over the years i have had many things wrong, bad back, eye twitching, severe cramps, constant tiredness/lack of energy, foot pain etc etc. All of these symptoms were never put together by doctors and i didnt have a clue what MS even was?
I have now been diagnosed with optic neuritis and now two different doctors have mentioned MS but no diagnosis. I have a head scan this saturday but i feel i’m looked down upon, like i’m making it all up. They even tried me on antidepressants for the tiredness for 3 months but made no difference as i said it wouldnt because i know im not depressed. Apparently everything means your depressed now days.
Thanks in advance!
The MRI scanner doesn’t care what people think of you or what you suspect they might think. It isn’t interested in opinions - it deals in facts and is therefore the friend of someone who feels he is not being heard clearly. In any case, the fact that they are scanning you suggests that they are listening now all right.
I hope that you get some answers soon.
Alison
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And weird as it sounds, antidepressants are often used to help with pain relief.
Hi Robert,
I know just how you feel about being thought a hypochondriac.
Friends, family, work colleagues and neighbours, even my mother, they all thought it of me for years. Eventually I began to believe it myself, after all, I was frequently at the doctor’s surgery with various complaints, some of them minor, but some not so. I even started to think that the doc had labelled me as a bit of a health neurotic at one stage. But he hadn’t, that was all in my head, he’d actually taken me quite seriously, and I was eventually diagnosed with MS (long story cut short).
Others on this forum have written of similar experiences. It just seems to go with the territory I’m afraid, especially if most of your symptoms are invisible to others, as many of mine are. I have one particular family member who always asks about my symptoms, usually responding with a shrug as she says… “Oh well - I get that - we all get that - it’s nothing”. I explain, “No, it’s MS”, but am still dismissed. I now don’t call on that particular relative anymore.
Hope your MRI scan went well and you get some answers soon.
Ben
Hi Robert,
Unfortunately this is a common prejudice we who have MS come up against. Even though I had optic neuritis, drop foot and tingling in my fingers a neurologist preferred to diagnose me with a “Functional Disease”. I’m still not sure what that means.
It was only after he’d written off almost everything he could think of (including venereal disease) that I had a lumbar puncture which finally met the criteria for MS. He got really grumpy about that, we saw him leave the hospital grounds before we did.
If you’re interested it’s called the McDonald Criteria and it’s complicated. It’s a good guide to the hoops you’ll have to jump through.
Wishes,
Anthony