Quote:
Originally Posted by KelsieG
Hi all,
I am a 26 year old female. I teach at a community college and have no health insurance. About three weeks ago, I started experiencing feelings of weakness in my right leg, only in the evenings. About two weeks ago, I woke up and the entire right side of my body felt weak--leg, hand, arm, and face (including my right eye, which FEELS droopy, but is not). I knew it wasn't muscular weakness, because I could still stand on one leg, lift weights, do yoga, etc. A few mornings ago, I began experiencing numbness on the right side of my face, to the point that speaking became difficult. I went to the ER and they did blood work (all normal) and an MRI, to rule out stroke and, possibly, MS. The doctor came and told me that everything looked fine, but that I had a Chiari malformation. He then told me it was nothing to worry about and NOT the cause of my symptoms. He thought perhaps some compressed nerves were to blame for my arm/leg symptoms, and that my face was going numb due to anxiety.
I came home and looked it up and was shocked to find that a vast majority of my symptoms are present with Chiari malformation!
I have been prone to terrible headaches for much of my life and have always chalked it up to stress/hormones (maybe it still is...I don't know). I have also had an odd "clicking" that felt as though it were coming from inside my skull when I ran/jumped. I don't know if that has to do with anything, but it always unnerved me a bit.
I guess I'm wondering...can Chiari symptoms present on only one side of the body?? My left side is completely fine. The weak feelings on the right side are going away a little, but my right eye feels as though someone is standing behind it trying to push it out of my skull. I'm also experiencing sensitivity to light and sound. My mother thinks it's a sinus infection (she had one that made her face go numb and messed up her eyesight) and told me to take some Mucinex D. I'm growing increasingly certain that my chairi malformation has something to do with this.
Was my doctor wrong to brush this off? Should I find a new doctor or go ahead an follow up with the old one? I would really like to try to find myself some health insurance before a firm diagnosis is made. If the only treatment option really is surgery...I...I just can't imagine.
I feel very alone and frightened right now. Will chiari kill me? Will the symptoms rapidly get so bad that I lose motor function or my eyesight? I'm terrified and poor and I feel a little angry that the doctor didn't even entertain this as a possibility.
Does anyone have any advice as to what I should do now?
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I have never had headaches until Jan 2010 and it started with the clicking noise in my head like you described. Then, It was a continuous pain in a specific place in my head, a pressure pain like someone had their fist inside my head pushing to the top of my head, mine on the left top.I also experienced numbness in the left side of my face. After the Chiari diagnosis 11/2010 I then had a MRI with a study of the flow of Spinal Fluid and that is when I was also diagnosed with Arnold's Chiari 11/2010. My Chiari was causing my spinal fluid not to flow and causing the pressure in my head (Arnold's Chiari) Immediately 11/2010 they put a shunt in my head to let the fluid flow instead of being trapped in my head (immediate relief). It took almost a year to get the correct diagnosis and a different doctor to diagnosis it correctly. The shunt relieved the pressure pain but did not relieve all my symptons. Pain when I sneezed, coughed, or gagged. That was from the Chiari where my "brain tonsils" were pushed through the opening in the base of my skull due to my skull being too small for my brain. I then had Chiari decompression surgery 2/2011 where they make the opening @ base of skull larger and removed a part of my vertebrae to give my brain more room. This surgery helped with the remaining pain I was experiencing. I still have to have the shunt because the aquaducts that allow flow are small and have evidently gotten smaller with age. I was 48 when all this began. It usually effects people earlier since it's a congenital condition (born with it). No idea why it affected me at such late age.