Day 1 Shingles/post-viral syndrome/dysautonomia

A few years ago I had Shingles and after not taking time off to heal, developed a post-viral syndrome. My symptoms can all be traced back to the autonomous nervous system and I’ve been treating them as POTS and MCAS. I’ve tool this year off (finally reached a point where I couldn’t work anymore) to focus myself on getting better.

I’ve improved quite a lot. I do Pilates once a week, walk a lot, the brain fog is much better. But I still have pretty hard core flares or symptoms that are closely correlated with feelings of anxiety and stress. For example, if my shingles affected nerve hurts, I can feel a rush of anxiety and adrenaline take over and there will be a crash afterwards. I’ll spend a few days feeling horrible, waking up with a bad sore throat and phlegm, hives, sleep most of the day. This anxiety/adrenaline correlation wasn’t there at the beginning. I would just crash and I couldn’t figure out why so I kept pushing myself to get over it, which now I know was a bad pattern as well. I have an intuition that after being so ill for three years I’ve somehow internalised what would bring up a crash and I somehow participate in activating a fight or fly response.

It seems that TMS is quite controversial in the dysautonomia/POTS/MCAS community but I’m going to give it a try. I started doing mediation a year ago and I did a CBT/mindfulness/mediation app treatment for my post-viral hyper-sensibility to sound and they both really really helped which makes me think that there is something quite complex going on between the autonomous and somatic nervous systems. It seems important to me to make clear that I still think there is something physiological going on, caused by the Shingles virus. But I’m also quite convince that those symptoms are much much better, and there is a sort of mind/body overreaction that I need to unlearn somehow.