Hey there, to anyone reading this, what an elaborate journey I have been on since my car accident (this was definitely a trigger for my health condition/s)
I’d like to just summarise where I have been and where I am now, in the vain attempt to assist someone that may be going through a similar situation.
I had a car accident, head on collision, in Dec 2023. After the accident my health started to deteriorate quite rapidly. The very first thing I started to notice was numb and tingly hands. I then struggled with hand to eye coordination and being a senior manager in automotive engineering, this wasn’t good.
I’ll fast forward a wee bit because my GP was next to useless as she sent me for all kinds of random tests which were amazingly irrelevant, like a sleep study! Anyway, I finally got in front of a Cardiologist because I thought I was dying and having heart attacks (I know, shh, it was kinda funny in hindsight but scary to live through). I explained my symptoms and he was the first health care (?) worker I met that took an interest in my car accident so he sent me for a Head MRI. I’ll skip quite a lot just now as I went down the rabbit hole of MS diagnosis. I have 3 lesions in my Cervical spine and around 14 in my brain with many black hole transformed. Ok, so I now have MS BUT, and it’s a big but, my symptoms were not lining up and my neurologist, bless her cotton socks, was and has been so confused.
Right, now we’re closer to this time, I was getting quite frustrated with going mega lightheaded and dizzy upon standing, so, naturally, I started measuring my blood pressure from lying down to standing. It was fine, in fact, very good, but then, for whatever reason, I looked at my heart rate on the machine and it was like 136bpm, and I thought ‘No, surely not, I haven’t done anything’ I had never heard of POTS but I started rigorously checking and right enough, from lying to standing my heart rate would sky rocket. My resting heart rate is around 55-65 bpm (I do a lot of rowing machine workouts at home as I was attempting to force a cardiac situation to try to force matters to a head. Long story)
Yesterday I saw the cardiologist and after lots of tests and data, I have POTS.
Now, the symptoms are so similar in many respects to MS but I believe that many of my daily symptoms are down to POTS and not MS. My numb, tingly and eye twitches seems to be MS but my tachycardia is clearly POTS.
After all of this I would like to stress one thing to any person that may take an interest in the above - gather your own data, search for answers and be strong and persistent with the NHS people you meet, you really do need to own your struggles because no one will do it for you. My mind is now at a bit more of a rest as I understand why my life is so dramatically changed and I can move on with creating a new one because the old one has gone.
More than happy to discuss anything with anyone should they wish but also, is there anyone else out there with similar situations to share?