Tag Archives: brain fog

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Brain symptoms and sleep.

I wanted to clarify something from my last post. I got a few messages which made me realise that when I said, “This year, my worst symptoms by far are from the shoulders up”, people thought I meant the over-analytical, perfectionist tendencies I have, which cause me to ruminate on details and not be content with anything. It makes sense, since that is what I was discussing for the majority of the post, but that’s not what I meant. In no way do I consider those tendencies — my personality — to be symptoms. It might make things a little easier if I weren’t always craving change and could accept life as it is, but I love that part of me that never feels settled, it’s the part that longs to keep learning, better myself, change the world. With a different body, who knows what I’d be allowed to accomplish.

When I wrote about my worst symptom, I was referring to my Buzzy Brain. I’ve tried to describe it on here before and I’ve discussed it with doctors, but I’ve still never talked to anyone who seems to experience the exact same thing. I’ve started to wonder if it isn’t some sort of optical migraine or silent seizure or atypical narcolepsy. It comes on very quickly and it’s not brain fog, not even close. Moments of mental acuity, accurate recall and speedy connections — the confidence that I can master any information like I had in the past — are quite rare; my mind is usually pretty fuzzy, foggy. The Buzzy Brain is entirely different. It doesn’t make thinking difficult, it literally stops my functioning, both physical and mental. It starts with a physiological buzzing feeling in my brain, as though, if you could look under a microscope at the cells and synapses, you would be able to see the disability. I get testy, my forehead can feel numb, my eyes droop, I slur, my tinnitus roars, everything is impossible: walking, answering a question, watching TV… and there is no pushing through it. I can’t even relax in a dark room, listening to an audiobook. It is my great limiter because, even on days when my body and muscles feel capable of activity, if I have the Buzzy Brain, nothing can happen. The odd thing is, it is reset by even a very short nap. I can meditate in silent solitude, lying still for hours, and nothing will change, but, if I fall asleep for even 10 minutes, I get some relief. Maybe not total relief and maybe only for an hour, but enough to function. It is exactly like turning off a phone and plugging it in briefly just to get a little more battery life.

Of course this begs the question: is it 100% sleep-related? Could I eliminate this symptom if I had consistently good sleep quality over the course of months, years? I’ve had 5 sleep studies with no real answers. The first one in 2012 (long before I had my Buzzy Brain symptoms) showed my brain was waking up 49 times an hour. They diagnosed me with sleep apnea and gave me a CPAP.

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After the most recent one last June, my sleep doctor told me I didn’t have to wear the CPAP or my oral appliance anymore because obstructive sleep apnea wasn’t my problem. I was overjoyed because the CPAP keeps me awake all night and the oral appliance causes terrible jaw pain and TMJ issues. But, I know I feel better when I can manage to sleep while wearing one of them, so there’s something there. It was explained to me that as my tongue relaxes and my airway is just slightly blocked, my brain wakes up (not enough blockage for my oxygen to drop and not enough wakeage to be fully conscious) and that’s what it feels like, subjectively: that I’ve never really slept properly. This is part of nervous system dysfunction — the brain always being on high alert, never “allowing” deep sleep. So, although I may not need the CPAP for air flow, I feel better with it keeping my airway open so my brain isn’t triggered. But I can’t wear it, so what to do…?

When I saw my ND a few weeks ago, she said she wanted me getting 10-12 hours of sleep in every 24 hour period. I was incredulous. It’s impossible, that’s literally twice what I get now. She looked at me hard: “Then you’re not going to get better.” I told her I was wiped out after my hyperbaric oxygen chamber appointments and she said she wanted me to sleep 3-4 hours after each session. On top of 8-10 hours at night. This is truly ludicrous. I struggle terribly to get 6 hours sleep and I very rarely nap during the day. Plus, I hate bed. Hate it. I can’t see it as a place of healing, it represents life passing me by and sickness. My doctor said: “Would you rather force bed now and not be sick later or stay as you are forever?”

I’ve tried a lot of sleep medications and supplements and they’ve all had intolerable side effects, made me feel worse than the lack of sleep does or done nothing at all. I’m still not falling asleep until after 3am most nights. I know what everyone says about better sleep quality before midnight, but some of the best hours of my day are between 10pm and 2am, so I’m resistant to change. But I could go to sleep earlier, if I wanted to — my problem is not getting to sleep, it’s staying asleep and this is a harder issue to medicate. I thrash around in pain and nightmares for 5 hours, fight against encroaching consciousness for another hour or two and then my mind takes off at light speed and there is no going back. I feel quite helpless to change this and my doctor’s words are haunting me a bit now. Good quality sleep — or even just more hours of poor sleep — could be the ticket to healing.

I’ve gone significantly backwards the past few months, so I’m trying to convince myself that this autumn and winter will not exacerbate the downturn, but will be the perfect opportunity for hibernation and repair. So far, it’s not working. I see nothing positive about losing my garden oasis and the healing sun. I do have three new sleep medications to try, but… I don’t hold out hope. If anyone has any leads on a good pillow that doesn’t cause neck pain or ways to prolong sleep or force naps, please let me know.

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Update… Aborted. Again.

I’ve been trying to write an update for so long. It’s been 5 months since my last one. There’s been so much that I wanted to document, that it started to feel like a Herculean task to catch up and my symptoms have been such a rollercoaster, that I never seem to find an opportunity. When I have some respite, I cook, bathe, deal with insurance and appointments, tackle laundry, play with my dogs, sort through finances etc. Aaannd… I just hit a wall. Just like that. As I typed, I could feel my brain clogging up. I picture all the little ATP molecules grimacing, gasping and dragging their feet like the characters at the end of Stephen King’s story, The Long Walk, dragging themselves along until collapse is inevitable. It’s a shocking feeling. Mentally, I was really clear for about an hour this morning. Felt like I could write. Dreamed up grand plans for my day (make granola! call a family member! blog post!). I answered a few emails, talked to my husband a bit and then wrote this… And it’s gone.

My neurological symptoms are horrific. “Brain fog” is the best of it. I’d take lack of concentration, not being able to find words, memory problems any day over what I’ve been experiencing this year. It feels like physically–physiologically–my brain grinds to a halt. My eyelids get heavy, my vision gets blurry, my ears roar, I start slurring. As I’m writing this, it’s getting worse and there’s no pushing through. My body feels okay, my stiffness, weakness and pain levels are manageable this morning, but I can’t push through this neuro stuff. Even if my body feels capable of going to the park, my brain insists on being in bed with ear plugs and eye shades. I can’t even watch dull tv or listen to a meditation. It’s incredibly frustrating and quite alarming. And, in a clinical way, I am fascinated by the trajectory of my symptoms over the past four years.

Year 1 was horrific viral, malarial, drenching sweat, nighttime hell and constant chills. That ended for the most part in Year 2 and became predominately “nightly flu” and pain, pain and more pain. Year 3 was the best of times and the worst of times: a bedbound, suicidal winter (when I finally got the permanent ME/CFS sore throat) turned into a much more stable spring and summer after my pain eased up. Year 4 started in a deep, reactive crash and became the year of crippling neurological symptoms. Year 5 (which started at the beginning of this month) so far is all over the place. My main focus is to work on the symptoms that have been with me throughout all of these years: sleep dysfunction, headaches, hypotension and infections. Plus, social contact would be good.

I have to power down now. The long-awaited update will come soon, I hope. I have so much to say.

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June Update

It’s been a while since I’ve had the energy to write an update. As usual, I have a lot to document in terms of doctors and tests, but, overall, not much to report on my life and illness. My mother was here from Ireland this past week and that was, by far, the highlight of the last 4 months. 6 days seemed like 6 hours, though, and I’m left feeling a bit barren after her departure, like there are tumbleweeds blowing around inside my chest and hollow silence echoing against the inside of my skull.

I’m still housebound besides healthcare appointments and the odd dog walk on the scooter. I do think I’m marginally better than this time last year, though, which is heartening considering the horrendous ordeal of last autumn. Mostly, I think this because I’m walking more steps than I have since 2012. I regularly hit 2,000 on my pedometer, which does wonders for my mental well-being to think there is forward momentum. However, the flip-side is I have had more severe muscle pain and out-of-character joint aches. I am stiff in the morning and try to make myself put on compression stockings and a back brace if I’m going to stand in the kitchen for any length of time. I know I should scale back movement because, when I do, the muscle pain is better, but I’m really grasping onto that measurable progress for dear life.

There are other slight improvements. My sleep is still better than it was the first 3 years I was sick (although, I still don’t get much and it is plagued with fitfulness, nightmares and pain). My headaches, although they have resurfaced somewhat in the last month, were gone for a few months earlier this year, which is utterly life-changing. My resting face goes from this :twisted: to this :? .

There are still, always, a lot of daily debilitating symptoms. For 3 full weeks after my birthday outing, I was not doing well. My flu symptoms came back and that always alarms me — chills, sore throat, extremely heavy muscles, pain. I also had a few bouts of the worst vertigo I’ve experienced since my tilt table test payback. One night it came on so quickly and viciously, I fell over and hit the floor on my way to the loo from bed. I was moaning out loud from the queasy out-of-bodiness, which is unlike me, and I was reminded again of Laura Hillenbrand and how unrelenting vertigo could possibly be the worst imaginable symptom.

Hair loss hasn’t stopped, but is better than last year. Or the short, choppy cut disguises it more. My eyes are their usual nightmare of blurriness and sore extraocular muscles, even though I am regimented about (gently) scrubbing the lashes and using preservative-free tears throughout the day. Tinnitus and skin are still bad, my neck is still banjaxed. I am still spending about 14-17 hours in bed each day. I guess that’s a bit better than last year.

Finally, there is no real change in my worst symptom: Brain Drain. Which doesn’t describe it. I’ve been trying to articulate this symptom for years — to doctors, to my husband, my mother. It’s not brain fog. What I call brain fog feels tired and cloudy, causes effort to recall and calculate things. My Buzzy Brain is like Stephen King’s The Long Walk: if you can imagine being made to walk until you physically drop, but then transfer that body feeling to the brain. The same way muscle exhaustion is physical, my brain exhaustion feels physical. My brain can’t take one more step to do anything. Can’t read, write, speak, hear. It comes on gradually, so I usually find myself wading through the quicksand of a conversation or article, slurring or rereading the same thing over and over. I get testy, dizzy, weighted down by head pain and then realise, Oh, duh, time to go to bed and stop everything. Not being able to push through the brain problems (just finish this sentence, this tv show, this meal) is much more depressing than not being able to push through the physical limitations. Take my body, just, please, leave my mind.

The outcome of this is nothing ever gets done. I never finish tasks and months slip by. I also never seem to get going on any plan of attack to conquer the myriad of abnormal test findings: candida, low immunoglobulins, high cholesterol, reactivations of viruses, methylation problems, high mycotoxins. There’s always a bigger fire to put out — the poisoned nocturnal reactions, the crashing blood pressure, the death of my bowel — before I can carefully address less acute problems, while tip-toeing through the minefield of menstruation mast cell instability. Although, given my track record, maybe the best treatment for my body is no invasive treatment at all, just lots of pacing, meditation, good food and the pursuit of laughter.

The few things on which I am actively working are my hormone deficiencies and my tanked thyroid (as per usual). Since last September, I have now quintupled my levothyroxine (T4) and tripled my liothyronine (T3) and nothing has changed. I’m spending an absolute fortune on compounded meds, hoping my body will absorb them better than the generic, affordable ones, but, so far, no dice. I will update soon about my new, wonderful endocrinologist and her thoughts (as well as my other doctor visits).

So, almost 3 years and 8 months sick and that’s where I’m at. If I could find relief from the social isolation and financial instability, there could be some sort of life here.

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But, as it stands, I take my joy from the incredibly beautiful spring we’ve had here in Seattle and every opportunity to lie outside in the garden oasis my husband has created and see my dogs run in the park.

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Throwback for ME Awareness

To acknowledge the last day of M.E. Awareness Month, I am reposting an excerpt from my diary from three years ago. I had only been sick for four or five months, I had no idea what was going on and felt for sure it would kill me.

Muscles pumped full of lead ~ No. Heavier. Plutonium. Filled with liquid hot metal until they might burst. Heavier than anyone can imagine, aching, ready to strain, buckle, seize up. Ready to sprain with the slightest stretch, no tone, no strength. Climbing stairs is climbing Mount Everest. Slurred words, room spinning, head aching, chest tightening, heart leaping, entire body shaking, vibrating. Chills. Bone-chills. Shivering, unable to talk, nose going to fall off, can’t breathe, feet going to fall off, ice water running up and down my spine, head fogged over with frost, scalp taut, ears infected with cold, ice water spine, ice water spine.

Then, fever heat. Body on fire. Feet going to explode from the pooled blood, eyes burning, brain swollen. Spine and neck blistered with white-hot embers, waiting for bed to burst into flames. And the sweats come. Sweat running down my chest, pooling in my belly button. Sweat behind my knees, my lower back, above my top lip, in rivulets down the sides of my nose, my hair and the base of my skull drenched. And I’m shaking, reaching for water. I don’t want to die. My palms are sweating and my throat is sore and I’m so thirsty, but can barely drink. I have to go to the bathroom, but don’t think I can make it. I have crawled to the bathroom with concrete blocks tied to my arms and legs, while someone is spinning the room around me and zapping me with electrical current and blowing a dense fog ~ more like a smoke ~ into my ears and up my nose and down my throat, so I can’t breathe and I can’t think.

It feels like what I imagine encephalitis must feel like. Meningitis. Botulism. Typhoid. Consumption. It feels malarial, paralytic, neurotoxic. I just keep thinking, I don’t want to die.

Two hours ago, I was chatting on the phone to my mother. I was throwing a ball for my dogs. Without warning, I have to go to bed. It’s like a huge finger is pressing down on me and all I can do is go to the ground. If I try to get up, the whole hand holds me down. Huge hands holding me down so that every movement takes more energy and effort than it ever should or ever has before. I watch someone run up stairs on tv and my eyes tear up with desire and jealousy. All I want is to be able to stand for a while, laugh without noticing because it’s not a rare occurrence, talk with friends without my throat turning into sandpaper and my back seizing up and having to go straight to bed from the exertion. All I want is to sleep. Deeply. Without nightmares. And sit without pain, walk without breathlessness, feel light again, like those hands aren’t holding me down, like I could skip or twirl. All I want is strength, stamina, health. To live life without the fear of repercussions. To live life. To not die.

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Doctor Love/Hate

A few weeks ago, I had the follow up with the rheumatologist I saw in January. The one who came highly recommended by multiple doctors I’ve seen. The one who spent over an hour and half with me at our initial appointment. The one who wrote the most thorough and accurate notes on my history and even sent them to me. The one who ordered spine x-rays, a DEXA bone scan, blood work for inflammatory bowel disease and who did a quick ultrasound of my shoulders. The one who knew about the pretty much unknown mast cell activation disorders and even knew most of the tests to order. The one who wrote a book called, “You Don’t Look Sick.” … So, you’d think he’d get it.

At one point, he asked, “Why are you in bed so much?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. This was my second appointment in a row; I’d previously spent a useless hour with my therapist, not having anything to talk about and feeling out of place. Maybe my brain was ticking over even slower than I had realised.
“Because I’m sick…”
I thought he understood my illness because of the thorough chart notes, but I’d have to reread them. Maybe he didn’t understand the key part about ME and post-exertional malaise (second worst description of anything, ever, after chronic fatigue syndrome). Maybe he didn’t quite get that my battery dies very quickly and, if I push through, I’m in a world of hell and the battery never quite fully goes back to where it once was.
He said (and this is a direct quote), “If your hope for the future depends on getting disability, you’re not going to get out of bed.”
And then my brain blew up.

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I know many, many people have dealt with this sort of thing before — this blatant skepticism about their illness — but I hadn’t. Nobody had ever questioned me to my face. I didn’t really hear anything else he said after that because I did a white-out with fury. This manifested itself with me bursting into tears, unfortunately. I told him I wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t in bed to try to get disability. He said something along the lines of: “It may not be that you’re a malingerer [I remember that word clearly], but that you subconsciously are staying in bed because you need the money.”
Wow.
I was raging. After waiting two years to apply for disability in the desperate hope that I could go back to work… after going from a happy, high-functioning person to practically an invalid… it was too much to think this might cross somebody’s mind. Why would I want to give up my whole life to get 1/10 of the money I used to make? I cried the whole way home. I kept thinking about it and crying the whole evening. Granted, I was premenstrual, but my anger can’t come out in yelling and stomping anymore, so it just bubbled out in tears. Would he have said that if my husband were with me? Would he have said that if I were bedbound with cancer?

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There was slight vindication when he told me I had to try increasing my steps and I told him I have: from 500 in January to 1500 now.
Then he said I had to try “bicycle yoga”, lying down and I said, “I do! I try to do yoga poses and gentle stretches whenever possible.”
Then he said, “You need to come in here with a list of your current symptoms, your meds, your questions and concerns.” I waited for him to finish drawing an example of the page he wanted me to write and then I told him: “I did — it’s on the back of that sheet of paper.”
“Oh, I didn’t look at that,” he said. “A+.”

Amazingly, after this conversation, he told me my clinical diagnosis was mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) and prescribed Cromolyn.

I smoldered for a week and then went to see my therapist who works in the same clinic and has known Dr. O for 37 years. I let loose on him. I railed for a full 45 minutes and was completely supported and validated. He said he’d seen it happen before and that, typically, when Dr. O is called out on his behaviour, he is blind to what he did and remorseful. He read me the notes that Dr. O had written and they were great — he wrote that he wanted to treat me for MCAS and also continue to look at inflammatory conditions, that I wasn’t depressed… There wasn’t a mention of ME in the notes and that’s how I wanted it. I went to him in the first place for his diagnostic talents, to have someone search for other possible answers. So, I’ve decided to give him another chance. My therapy session completely calmed my outraged soul and I’ve let it go. I think I will write Dr. O a letter when I feel up to it, explaining professionally why he was bone-headed and offensive. I’m actually looking forward to seeing him again, so I can be the calm, assertive person I normally am with doctors.

So, about MCAS: I haven’t dealt with scary symptoms (anaphylaxis, tongue swelling) in years and I react terribly to most medications, so I’m hesitant to start treating with mast cell stabilizers, histamine blockers or other anti-inflammatory drugs besides Prednisone. However, I wonder how many of my daily symptoms could be caused by mast cell problems (GI issues, bowel swelling, headaches, fatigue, brain fog, sinuses, pain etc.), so I’m also excited to have this diagnosis and the treatment options available. There’s also a teeny tiny part of me that whispers, What if your only problem is MCAS? What if mast cell problems caused everything from anaphylaxis until now? I don’t believe that — of course it’s multifactorial and involves many different pathways: immune, neurological, endocrine, gastrointestinal, vascular — but, there’s still a seed of excitement that something might make a difference.