And now its MS :-(

[Hetty80]

So today I typed into google bladder problems as the doc thinks this is what my pelvic pain is. What comes up? ...... MS. I had anxiety about this due to pulsatile tinnitus and tingling sensations about 5 years ago. After consultations with a neurologist and an MRI scan that was fine I put these worries to bed and eventually my symptoms disappeared. After 5 years I read this on google this morning and have been tingling all over my body ever since. Quite clearly an anxiety attack but yet my brain still tells me it could be MS. On top of that as I research other symptoms on google I find vision problems is also as symptom and I do now have to wear glasses :-( I'm feeling frustrated, confused and scared :-(

[Serenity1990]

Ok, let me start by saying you have my every sympathy: I've been going through this living hell since January, it's totally wrecked my life.

Let me save you a few months of the hell. MS is not capable of causing tingling in your entire body from the outset, and it's very unlikely it could even cause this in very developed MS (which you would very much know about by now). It does cause vision problems, but very specific ones that would not be corrected with glasses and would be glaring obvious to your optician for what they were.

The above was intentionally vague as if I start going into specifics you'll develop the symptoms. But you really don't have anything to worry about, your symptoms are not at all consistent with MS. They fit anxiety pretty well though. :)

[Hetty80]

Thank you so much for your reply serenity. I would say 60% of me knows its anxiety and after reading your post maybe 80%. It's just so unbelievable that our minds can do this to our bodies and that constant "what if" niggle just doesn't dissappear. Are you still struggling with anxiety about MS?

[Serenity1990]

Yeah. I know rationally whilst my list of symptoms match, their presentation doesn't. That's the key difference with this one, and if you're unfortunate enough to do lost of googling on this disease the only way out is to do even more and read biologically how it works. From your question you haven't done much of the former so I do not recommend the latter.

In short, symptoms that are widespread, move around, come and go or change in presentation within a short timeframe are not MS. MS happens when the coating of particular nerves (controlling specific bodily functions) wears away. The wearing away can't suddenly switch between nerves or grow back and wear away again within minutes or hours. Realisation of this is the key to the road to recovery.

[Hetty80]

Now my tingles seem to just be in my feet and face rather than my whole body

[Serenity1990]

...

The above was intentionally vague as if I start going into specifics you'll develop the symptoms.


In short, symptoms that are widespread, move around, come and go or change in presentation within a short timeframe are not MS. MS happens when the coating of particular nerves (controlling specific bodily functions) wears away. The wearing away can't suddenly switch between nerves or grow back and wear away again within minutes or hours. Realisation of this is the key to the road to recovery.


Now my tingles seem to just be in my feet and face rather than my whole body

See what I mean? :roflmao:

[Hetty80]

Oh yes! That's good news then and a little bit funny when I read it like that. How do you know these facts though? Where did you learn them?

[katesa]

Oh yes! That's good news then and a little bit funny when I read it like that. How do you know these facts though? Where did you learn them?

I'm not sure where she learned them but as someone with MS, I can confirm my specialist backs her up :-)

[Hetty80]

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply. I really do appreciate that. People like me must really get on your nerves. Worrying about every tiny thing when you are actually suffering with MS. I'm so sorry x

[Serenity1990]

Anxiety sufferers latch onto MS because by its very nature it can produce just about any neurological symptom imaginable. Our nerves control virtually everything in our bodies, so whatever symptom of any sort you can think of, some website somewhere will note MS as a possible cause, and you'll find someone on an MS forum with that symptom. As an aside r.e. the forums, let's not forget that due to the unpredictable nature of MS many MS sufferers end up with anxiety so they have physical anxiety symptoms that they may attribute to MS on their forums, and also they're no more or less likely to suffer from other unrelated harness ailments than you or I, again the symptoms of which they may mistakenly attribute to MS. So if you've been looking in these sorts of places you'll be convinced pretty much any harmless symptom is caused by MS. As I've said above, the symptoms aren't really that important, it's their preaentation that is. There's a few posts on here by a retired neurologist whose username was RLR that first helped me realise this.

I think the most scary thing about MS is the concept that you'll have it forever. However two things helped me with this worry. Firstly, a neurologist in the US treated MS patients with diet alone for over four decades. He achieved nearly a 95% success rate in either halting disease progression or preventing further relapses in his patients across this time period. Unfortunately because nobody really knew why it worked, and the fact that with a diet you can't formulate a statistical control group, doctors have never been allowed to treat their patients this way in the rest of the US and Europe. Now with the increased research into digestive enzymes and their relation to certain diseases science is a little closer to discovering why the diet worked.

Secondly, a cure genuinely isn't far away. Scientists in a US research institute began a program in 2006 where they took 28 MS patients, effectively wiped their immune system and injected stem cells which would formulate a brand new immune system. They actually wanted to observe what went wrong in these patients' immunology that caused MS, so they were put under observation. To the doctors' surprise, none of the patients redeveloped symptoms, which as far as I'm aware eight years on is still the case. As a result various incarnations of this treatment are now under trial, and should be available within the next decade or so assuming all goes well.

Apologies for the essay, and I'm not writing all this because I think you've genuinely got MS, it's quite clear to me, albeit to my medically untrained mind, that what you're actually suffering from is anxiety. I know how difficult it is to take the reassurance 100% from personal experience, so I'm trying to help you realise that the catastrophising you're doing isn't necesserily all that catastrophic.

:)

[blueangel]

The magic words are in your original post:

After consultations with a neurologist and an MRI scan that was fine

MS can show in an MRI long before any symptoms show.