Sorry to hear that PJ. Let's hope the medical results will bring some good news or at least no bad news. For what it is worth, the year after I stopped drinking was the most painful ever on a physical level. Alcohol is many things but sadly also a great pain killer. So once you get sober for a while you start to feel the pain of the ailments with a vengeance - one of the stumbling blocks of sobriety. For me it took 9 months to even be able to walk again, and things like gout - something I never had when still drinking - popped up when I was newly sober. Energy levels were zero. I went to a great number of tests and scans (could it be hemachromatosis? Lyme? etc. etc.) to find out what was wrong with me, all to no avail.

Things cleared up after about 9 months of sobriety, at the same time as I started to follow a healthy diet (in my case Zone - as documented in the PN forum), but even that may have been a coincidence.

All this just to say that it's possible things may still turn for the better, and that it takes time to heal the damage the years (or decades) of drinking has done. You were right to remark that drinking masked the symptoms.