Fine. Not fine. Totally out of it. Fine again.

[heather529]

I posted a question like this in the Expert forum but then found a group of people who actually deal with this every day -- Im sorry that there are so many :(  but so happy to have found this!!  Everything I have read pointed me to this community....   First, I know that I won't get any medical advice here but I am HOPING that someone else might have experienced something along these lines and share their thoughts with me. Yesterday I had what I am calling an "episode". I was perfectly fine one second and the next I deteriorated at a rapid rate.

Here is a timeline of events: 12:45 - riding in the car to take my husband to work (scale of 1-10 with 10 being perfect, I was at a 10) 12:55 - Husband had to pull over so I could be sick on the side of the road. Became very dizzy and had tunnel vision. Husband turned around to take me back home. (Had to pull over twice more on the ten minute ride home) 1:10 - In bed, curled up. Husband says I was incoherent and unresponsive. He called an ambulance. Pulse was at 150. I have no memory of anything from the moment we turned around to head back home until we were half way to the hospital in the ambulance, where I then came to. ER did blood work and a brain scan and said it was a vertigo.  VERTIGO!  

I went from perfectly fine to unresponsive to perfectly fine. This IS NOT the first time this has happened. Four months ago I had a similar experience, but it was not nearly as severe. If yesterday's episode was a 8, the first episode was a 4 on the scale of severity. I think the paramedics and ER staff felt that I was "on" something (they kept asking me what I took) I take no medications (or ANY drugs)

I am going to my family doctor on Tuesday to look into some testing with a specialtist because if the 2nd was twice as bad as the 1st episode, then I am afraid of what the 3rd episode will do.

SYMPTOMS experienced at the time: Extreme vomiting without warning, excessive sweating, tunnel vision when I could open my eyes, extreme dizziness, rapid heart rate (150 bpm at time of transfer to hospital), deteriorated to unresponsive and weird "something is not right" feeling in the chest.

I do not really have a medical history - I get the occasional flu and cold, but that is all (I am a 32 year old woman btw) I left the hospital last night in tears because I feel like something is seriously wrong and they didn't seem to care. They thought I was on drugs and that they wore off, so all good. SO not okay with that.

Today I have been experiencing muscle twitches through out the body off and on, stiffness in my legs, pain in my joints that comes and go's, a mild dull achy headache and weird speech problems (all of these have actually been ongoing for about a year now but I assumed it was just a 'getting older' thing -- now I am thinking it has something to do with what ever is going on with me and today they have ALL been worse and more frequent)  Speech problems include slurring words, missing words or the wrong words coming out.  Almost like my brain isn't quite connected to my mouth.  Perfect example, this morning in SS class I was talking and got stuck on the word keep - all I could get out was k-k-k before I burst into tears  : /     *side note (may be unrelated)  I weighted myself this morning and I have lost 14 pounds in 45 days without any changes to my diet/exercise.

Any thoughts????   This is pretty scary stuff  :(

[HVAC]

ERs are not good places for diagnosing anything. Something is going on. I would push my GP if it were me. It took me years to be diagnosed with MS and years to be diagnosed with Cancer. I knew something was not right but I did not push hard enough especially with the Cancer.

You know your body and you know something is wrong. I do not know what it is but it is real obviously. Keep pushing the GP. I can't begin to say what specialist you need to see and it may take many until they find what is wrong. I did that with the cancer. You or your husband are your best advocates. Sometimes it took my husband speaking to a Doctor for them to take me seriously.

Alex

[LilMinnie]

I will pray for you,  too.  Your experiences sound very disconcerting and I hope you find some answers soon.

Hugs, blessings, and peace,
Minnie :)

[heather529]

Pastor Dan, thank you so much for replying to my post!  Thank you also for praying for me -- prayers are powerful and I truly appreciate that you would take time to pray for a stranger.   ~Heather

[PastorDan]

Thought one: Vertigo is a symptom, not a condition.  It can be a symptom of a wide variety of things, from MS to stroke to a head cold to..  well, you name it.  Your doctor(s) should investigate until the cause is found, or until they run out of things to investigate while trying to find the cause.

Second thought: Your description sounds severe in the extreme.  It does NOT sound (to this untrained and somewhat iffy mind) exaggerated, contrived, imagined, or in any other way less severe than you described.

Having said that, there is certainly an (understandable) element of fear or fright in this experience, and I would have to think that your symptoms were magnified by these feelings.  I am not saying that they weren't as bad as you felt they were; rather, I am saying that fear, anxiety, panic, or similar emotions can pump adrenaline into your system, making these symptoms ACTUALLY worse, not merely worse in the way you perceive them.

No matter how much the emotional component might have contributed to your symptoms, however, I doubt very much that it was the first cause.  Now, if it were me, I'd consider all kinds of things within the head, as well as potential cardiac and autonomic points of origination.

Even if I am right about that, it could still be any of many things within these broad categories.  This is why you need professional attention, because someone trained in medicine can track down the many possibilities far better than could a preacher you meet online, who has issues of his own!

One thing I can do I will, and that is to pray that you find credible and accurate answers, and that these troubling experiences never return!