hey IQ
Diagnosed with the "Yuppie flu" FM/CFS in and around year 2000 after I had my son...about a year before they told me I was also a spazz.
I was provisionally diagnosed with CFS for a while. My GP wasn't entirely happy with that cos I had "too many symptoms". But then I had too many symptoms for everything else as well.
The first 4-6 years were the worst...honestly if I was a horse they would have shot me, I felt pretty worthless some days. They told me it was in my head, I was depressed, then they offered me pain killers and allergy shots. I basically stopped going to see the Dr. as much as possible.
Guess what
this spazz did fo the first few years? Self-diagnosed with depression. D'oh. Then it took me another 2 years (or therabouts) to convince my GP I'd been wrong about that.
My trouble was I had very little interest in my body. I just used brute force and ignorance to get it to what wanted, and otherwise abused/ignored it. The mind is a whole lot more interesting, IMO. That's not the first time I misdiagnosed myself with a psychosomatic disorder, but was definitely the most regrettable.
After realising how silly I'd been , I had to sit there listening to a long line of doctors making the exact same mistake, rather than investigating.
What finally convinced me it was something organic was that there was no damned thing that I could ever do to pull myself out of it. Everytime I tried, I made it worse instead. Plus, .it didn't seem related to my mood at all. Yeah, i know you can be depressed unconsciously, but I'm usually too self-aware not to catch myself getting depressed.
Cold=pain, fatigue to the point where I couldn't think and I sounded and walked like a drunk sometimes, dizziness, allergies to things that never bothered me before and the list kept growing, asthma, low grade fevers, waking up feeling like someone beat me in my sleep.
<<---Umm, check out my nick. That has proved embarrassingly prophetic .
Well, I always did have a
little bit of ataxia, but not so much that it would even cross my mind very often. When I made that nick, I was casting around for a word that means "random" . Plus Frederick Pohl had a book of that title that I liked.
Now, yeah, not only do I walk exactly like a drunk sometmes, I also slur my speech like a drunk. The neighbours give me this really cynical look, if I ever remark that I don't drink.
Changed my diet, changed how I did things, what I even used to clean with. etc. Made progress, not by leaping bounds, but progress. It's gotten better, and I'm pretty active now, or at least I really try to be, but when I do too much, I know, and spend a couple days or so knocked on my ass feeling like I have the flu.
Hmm. Curious to know more about the changes you made.
I also avoid certain cleaning chemicals now (chlorine-based ones, especially, because I definitely have bad reactions to chlorine)
I started off with IBS around age 13, I've found that seems to be a common factor with some, some say it's the perfectionist mindset (type A personalities?)...maybe, I guess I can relate to that also, as I've always been a bit anal about things other people aren't that concerned with.
IBS is just about the one thing you mention that I've never had.
Please look into MD a bit more? It's not like I've described all the possible symptoms in my post. It's not like anybody has all the the possible symptoms. But you do have a substantial subset of them, from what you say. And if it
isn't psychosomatic, gets worse again, you really don't want to be jollied out of it.