Hi everyone, new to the forum here. Just to start things off, I have not been diagnosed with MS and I’m not 100% sure that I have MS. What I would like is some input on whether or not my symptoms currently align with MS, as I have faced a lot of cognitive decline as of late. I’m 25 years old and my symptoms have gotten significantly worse within the past few years. However, many of my symptoms have been present throughout most of my life. Many of the symptoms I have been writing off as simply a part of ageing, malnutrition, stress, or simply not trying hard enough. I found out about MS only yesterday as the symptoms I was looking up lead me to a discussion on MS. So what I’m going to do is try to list and organize any symptoms I feel might have some remote connection to MS, or simply cause problems in daily life.
Past Diagnosis:
- PDD(Pervasive Developmental Disorder)
- General Anxiety Disorder
I have not been to a neurologist recently, and in fact I haven’t been to a doctor in over 4 years. I don’t even know if I still have insurance.
Cognitive Symptoms:
Memory
My memory has been on a rapid decline, both short-term and sometimes long-term. It’s a bit inconsistent, but I can be as bad as forgetting what I’m doing while in the process, then just standing there trying to remember. One particular moment I can remember is operating a chop saw and suddenly it felt like I had a mind wipe and I forgot what I was doing. It took a good moment for me to process everything back again, and definitely freaked me out a lot. Where it has the most impact though is my daily life and remembering things that people tell me, causing a lot of frustration.I might be told to do something then I forget within less than a minute and I start doing something else without realizing. It makes doing things with multiple steps extremely time consuming because I’ll forget many of the steps and I’ll forget which steps I’ve done. It’s very frustrating and it feels humiliating as people watch me make multiple unnecessary trips. Even as I type this, I’m struggling to remember all of my symptoms and how they feel despite experiencing them on a daily basis. I tend to no longer remember how I felt during certain events. For example, I might not remember that a certain video game made me feel excited, or that a presentation made me feel anxiety. It just feels like an overall mental numbness where I can’t retrace my steps.
Mental Processing
Throughout my whole life I’ve had slowed processing, but it definitely feels as though I have to fight with it more than normal. It’s frustrating because while I feel as though I’m doing something fast, in reality a lot of time has passed and other people might look at me as if I’m lazy. It feels as though I have to process something 2 or 3 times before it actually registers into my brain, making me extra inefficient. It’s very inconsistent though as sometimes I’m super fast at something, as if weights were temporarily lifted from me.
Auditory Processing
My auditory processing is very poor and has only gotten worse recently as even the slightest accent can make someone impossible to understand. Even when talking to someone speaking my language with no accent, what they’re saying will randomly turn to gibberish and I’ll ask them to repeat what they said. This can be very annoying as it can end up with them repeating their sentence 2-3 times and this happens to probably close to 50% of the conversations I have. It creates a lot of social anxiety and I tend to avoid social interactions because of the possible embarrassing miscommunication. It works the other way around as I sometimes get a response as though I spoke in complete gibberish. Conversations are also more awkward because there’s a delay in my ability to process what’s being said to me and it sometimes comes across as passive aggressive. I tend to not process that someone is talking to me unless they speak directly to me and address me by name, so that can be interpreted as me ignoring someone. Noisy environments are very difficult to function in as the multiple channels of sound drive me nuts and I can’t focus on what anybody says to me. Whispering is near impossible for me to understand and I just end up nodding and smiling, making myself look like an idiot sometimes.
Visual Processing
My visual processing feels very poor as well as my eyes often have a difficult time focusing on what I need to. For example, when looking at a restaurant menu I tend to get extremely visually overwhelmed and just pretend like I’m reading while I’m actually mentally freaking out. Whenever I’m confronted with an unfamiliar environment, I have a difficult time processing where things are and where I need to go, despite the layout being fairly obvious. Both of these factors create a lot of anxiety when it comes to visiting new places and even grabbing something to eat at a restaurant. My vision tends to get blurry randomly throughout the day, primarily when I’m tired. It happens most commonly late at night before I go to sleep, but recently it has been happening during the daytime occasionally. It also impacts my ability to recognize faces as someone often has to be right in front of me to know who they are. This is another factor that can influence the idea that I’m ignoring someone because I might look at them briefly but not say anything since I don’t recognize who they are.
Coordination
Only recently, alongside the short-term memory loss, have I been experience a sudden loss in coordination and balance. I’ll find myself bumping into things or smacking my hand on something because I didn’t properly comprehend where my body was in relation to the object. Randomly I will lose my balance, sometimes nearly causing me to injure myself. It might happen when im standing while in conversation and suddenly I will tip over for no reason. Mostly I’ve been just attribution coordination problems with simple clumsiness, but there’s a very suspicious feel to it.
Physical Symptoms:
Headaches
Headaches are an everyday thing for me and it has gotten to the point where I’m used to them. They come with intense focus, and I just learn to handle the headache until it becomes unbearable and makes my vision blurry. An intense headache has become the daily sign that I’ve done a sufficient amount of work for the day.
Climate-Related
While natural heat tends to not affect any functions, indoor heating has a bizarre effect on me where I feel nauseous, my head hurts intensely, and my mental processing slows dramatically. It pretty much impairs my ability to get anything done during that period. This problem occurs primarily in the Winter as people often crank the heater up a lot.
Muscle Pain
Muscle spasms and twitches are a regular occurrence, especially in the biceps, legs, neck, and facial muscles. It takes very little to cause my legs and arms to hurt or feel numb. Every morning I tend to wake up with one of my arms being numb, but I also tend to sleep on top of my arms and I only feel the numbness in the arm I sleep on. I also seem to easily get muscle fatigue, which seems abnormal compared to those around me built similarly. It often makes me come across as lazy and becomes another source of frustration. Very rarely, I do get a minor and brief pins and needles sensation on my feet.
Bladder
For a large portion of my life I had a bed-wetting problem that took a lot of extra training just to eliminate the problem. Since then, I haven’t really had any noticeable bladder problems.
Summary:
- Severe short-term memory loss
- Mental processing delay
- Auditory processing deficiency
- Occasional garbled hearing and speech
- Inability to process multiple sources of sound
- Visual processing deficiency
- Blurry/unfocused vision
- Difficulty recognizing faces from a distance
- Frequent headaches
- Impaired cognitive function induced by indoor heating
- Frequent muscle twitches and spasms
- Easily caused numbness in legs and arms
- Rare pins and needles sensation on feet
- History of bed-wetting/bladder problems
Overall it would be preferable to not be diagnosed with MS, but I can’t rule it out. Thanks in advance to those who read this.