I've had a number of appointments with several of my doctors in the past two weeks and I've been getting asked a fair bit about how those went and how I'm doing. I'll leave a brief update about the main things on here to help me out with explaining.
I just started a muscle pain treatment called Trigger Point Injections to try encourage the muscles that are in the worst condition to release and also to relieve the horrendous pain I'm often still experiencing. For the first 48 hours following these needles my pain flared quite a bit (my doctor said this can be normal) but after a couple days I started noticing less pain and spasms so we're hoping this treatment continues to help. The injections need to be repeated every 3-4 weeks several times over in order to know for sure if they'll be beneficial for my recovery. I am still not going to physiotherapy for the time being but doing what I can manage at home. These injections, muscle relaxants, pain killers, light stretching, and heat treatments are what I'm all currently doing to help with pain and get me through my days!
In the last while I've been dealing with an increase in neurological, cognitive, and heart symptoms and I experienced a couple near fainting incidents because of this.
This past week I was diagnosed with a heart syndrome called Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS).
POTS means your body doesn't control your heart rate and blood pressure as it should during elevation changes. It causes your blood to follow gravity when going from a sitting or lying down position to standing and goes down to your legs rather than up to your brain. This causes your heart rate to rapidly increase as your heart tries to get blood up to your brain.
Not having enough blood going to your brain for even a short time causes dizziness that can get so severe your vision goes black (common for me) or you faint, and can cause a host of other symptoms. Unfortunately there is no cure for POTS, once you have it you have it for life, but symptom intensity can usually be decreased with treatment.
This definitely sheds some light on some of my worsening symptoms, but right now my doctors aim is to determine what is causing what symptoms as I still have a fair sized list and many symptoms can overlap other conditions.
I am currently off all my herbal antibiotics and have been for four weeks or so in preparation for being tested to see if the infections are still active. The ArminLabs test kit to test for this has been ordered by my ND so this will finally be getting done in the next week or so. These lab results will be helpful in telling us if I still have infections to fight or if I'm suffering from Post-Lyme Disease Syndrome, which is when you are in remission but the infections caused irreversible damage and/or triggered other imbalances and autoimmune mechanisms in the body. Basically they're trying to determine what's causing my symptoms in order to provide better treatment plans. Hopefully in the next few weeks and months we are given more insight.
