Day 1 Do I have TMS?

Hey guys, I have been meaning to make a post in this forum for some time now but didn't really know what to say. I want to give a long story about when my pain and symptoms began and where I am at now, and want to see if this sounds like I have TMS or if you think it is a medical condition. Thanks guys, I hope you take the time to read through this.

I am now 21 years old, and my symptoms began when I was 19. I remember the day like it was yesterday. It was the day of the super bowl, and my friends and I were having a watch party later that night. I remember waking up and feeling pretty bad from drinking large amounts of alcohol the night before, but just felt like I had a normal hangover, nothing really out of the ordinary. My friend and I were going to go to the store to get food and supplies for watching the game later.

One thing that isn't so clear to me is the time that I drank a five hour energy that morning. I can't remember if I started feeling weird while at the store and drank it after I was feeling bad, or if I drank it to start the morning to have energy throughout the day. Either way, I remember drinking a five hour energy and while at the store I started feeling very weird. My head felt very foggy and my neck felt tight, I was short of breath and felt like I could pass out at any moment. I felt horrible the remainder of the day but thought I could sleep it off and feel good the next morning.

The next morning came and I was still feeling horrible when I woke up. I had never experienced anything like this before and was very worried, I thought that there could be something extremely wrong with me. I tried to walk through campus and go to class that morning, but felt like I was going to pass out and went over to the campus doctor. He said that I was dehydrated and needed to drink water. I had some blood work done and went back home to lay down. I called him back in two days and he said my results were completely normal. I felt bad like that for a little over a week, but ended up getting almost completely back to normal feeling shortly after.

About a month or two later, after another night of heavy drinking, I woke up with that same feeling I had previously had. Light headed, dizzy, stiff neck, couldn't think properly, foggy, blurry vision, etc...
It had come back and was much worse this time around. I decided to change my diet and cut out alcohol for a while, and after a pretty long time I think I ended up feeling pretty normal again. Maybe not 100% but definitely much better.

The last time I remember feeling somewhat normal, I had been completely cutting out sugar in my diet because for some reason I thought this would help. Anyways, I remember waking up early to study for an exam, and buying a zero calorie energy drink. Shortly after drinking it every symptom came back to me as it had before.

Fast forward, my symptoms became constant and permanent after that last time, but many symptoms have changed or lessened, some worsened, and many come and go as they please.

Up until November of 2016, my symptoms were a very stiff neck, blurry vision, fatigue, foggy feeling in head, pain and pounding feeling in back of my head, very anxious all of the time for fear of dying, etc...

I woke up one morning and noticed that my right leg felt weak. I had strength on command but felt like I was developing a foot drop. Just recently, the same thing happened but with my left leg.

Some back story, I have always had social anxiety and been very self conscious. I constantly tense my muscles because I am unhappy with my body, although I have been in pretty good shape most of my life and played a season of college football. I had a pretty abnormal childhood, my mother went to prison when I was in 7th grade and my father was addicted to drugs. When my mom got out of prison she got a boyfriend that I fought with regularly and he used to beat her regularly as well. I moved out and lived with my grandmother for most of high school. Just two months before my onset of symptoms I had moved from my hometown with my grandmother into an apartment near the college I am currently attending with three random roommates.

During all of this, I had countless blood tests done which all came back completely normal. I have had two MRI's done for fear of having a chiari malformation or another neurological condition but the reports for both said there was nothing abnormal that they were seeing.

All of this has completely changed my life since this all started. It has affected my grades, finances, relationships, and my overall image of myself. I feel most of the time that I am never going to get better and at my lowest points thought of committing suicide because I could see no light at the end of the tunnel.

I have always been an over achiever and had so many things going for me in my life. Great grades, football scholarships, and had never even been late to a job that I held.

My current symptoms are: weakness in both legs when walking, feels as though both could drag if I didn't put in more effort, pain at the base of skull and a pounding feeling in the back of my head, fuzzy vision sometime while other times it is not too bad, shortness of breath sometimes, inability to think clearly, loss of drive to do things that I used to always want to do.

There have been a lot of inconsistencies with my pain and symptoms, and many have come and gone or worsened or lessened over this time span. Just reading this forum one time a while back I remember feeling so much better at one point in a social situation than I used to be, and really thought that I may end up feeling completely better at some point. However, I have a very hard time believing that all of my symptoms are from TMS, mainly because of how they just started over night, and I am always looking up my symptoms to see if I can find something that matches what I am feeling online.

Please, any feedback would be so appreciated, thank you so much.

 

Given the trauma you've been through, attributes of your personality that you've highlighted, and the behavior of your symptoms, I would be surprised if they weren't psychogenic in nature. If I were in your place, I would absolutely treat them all as TMS equivalents. Your case and many others demonstrate that TMS really isn't hard to decipher. Once modern medicine takes a serious look at the evidence, it will be the standard diagnosis for all kinds of chronic ailments.

Besides bad medical advice, there's always a part of us that wants to deny that symptoms are of the mindbody variety because they've been serving a purpose at an unconscious level. But many of us can attest that emotional wholeness is far preferible than the alternative. TMS almost always operates in vicious cycles -- it keeps us from tapping the healing capacity within and becoming the best version of ourselves.

Best of luck to you in your recovery. You've come to the right place -- This is just the beginning.

 

Hey, my symptoms started overnight as well. I had been spending a long time smoking a lot of weed, drinking and generally ignoring my problems and one day I woke up and it all hit me. I had crazy loud tinnitus (ringing in the ears), terrible back pain to the point where I couldn't sleep and great social fear and fear of what was happening to me. I was 21 and at university at the time. I cut out smoking weed completely as I had blamed this for it all, but more deeply it was that I was distracted from my emotions for too long (probably a few years, if not most of my life) and I was completely unaware of them.

Understanding TMS and how emotions can impact your body, and how your mind uses the pain/discomfort/fear to divert your attention has really helped me. I am a lot better now and am still working through the program. My instinct is to still run from my emotions and distract myself in any way possible, but when I sit with them, when I write about them, my pain alleviates.

Reading your story it does sound like you are a prime candidate for TMS. If I were you I would definitely learn more about TMS, read Sarno's books (healing back pain is good), and work through the structured program on this wiki: http://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/Structured_Educational_Program (Structured Educational Program)

I hope you find some relief, all the best.

 

Thank you for the reply and advice, I hope that you are right and I look forward to fully working through the program and getting on the road to recovery. I am glad that our stories are similar, and would like to discuss them in more detail at some point if you would be interested in doing that. Let me know.

Ethan

 

Thank you very much for the reply, I will take what you said and use it to help further my understanding about what's going on, and hopefully this will eventually lead to a recovery.