Thanks ladybyrd
I hope things are better with you now. The neurologist I visited specialised in migraine and epilepsy. He did not seemed concerned at my reports which is a good but his explanation left me in dilemma and stressed me to max. My main issue is feeling zoned out the whole day until I hit my bed. I am planning to get second Neuro opinion on my MRI about hyperintensity and the point my neuro mentioned "1 hyperintensity dot per 10 years of life"but I don't see that coming soon. When is your appointment? Wish any neuro comment on my MRI ASAP. I hope your appointment go well.

Hello, sorry to hear about your current issues. But yes it is normal for white spots to appear in the brain that are unrelated to any kind of health issue. It's just the natural process of aging. Just like little dimples and seemingly cracks in our bones, and shrinking of the spine, wrinkles as well, our brain doesn't maintain the same youthful appearance as we age.

And as your doctor already said, stress can explain the majority of your symptoms. And I imagine your job isn't an easy one. Add concern for your health on top of management and your brain just might be taking it's own vacations throughout the day.

Another question I would like to ask is how much sleep are you getting each night. While it's great that your blood work is normal and you don't seem to have a high lesion load for your age, are you getting enough sleep each night. To you wake up wishing you could crawl back into bed or do you bound out in the morning bright eyed and bushy tailed? Do you drink caffeinated drinks all day long to 'keep you going or keep you focused'? Are you a smoker or user of nicotine?

I'm not a doctor nor am I saying that your doctor IS correct, but there are a multitude of things that can make us lose our focus and feel like we are just 'zoned out', and even weak and uncoordinated. Lack of sleep is a big one.

If I were in your position not only might I seek second opinion from the neurologist, but I might also ask my GP for an EKG to be run, just to make sure that the heart isn't causing some kind of fuss, since it sounds like you've already ruled out most every other major physiological problem at this point, it's probably not the brain, the thyroid, or diabetes. Next stop is the heart and lungs. The body needs blood to function and oxygen to function.

Good luck and may you not end up having MS. It's not a fun thing to have so really happy to say welcome to the boards, but not to the club (as of yet).

Also there are no neurologists on this board, we can not give exact medical advice. Though we have a few nurses, but they too can only offer support not a medical opinion of what may be causing your symptoms. Very sorry if that was the main reason behind your posting on these boards

Thanks Starz

Indeed thank you very much for your kind advise. It really helped me a lot. Your right that things do show up, my only concern is are these intensitivities a maker of MS. As in MS these do appear.
I do get a sleep of around 7-8 hrs but it's not a complete sleep meaning that I will wake up in a middle occasionally for couple of minutes. Also I occasionally will have difficulty sleeping.

Well in terms of waking up, it gets difficult to wake up and I do not feel fresh even after a good night sleep. I do drink Coke 2 cans a day with my meals but not for keeping me up, it's just my habit. I do not drink or smoke at all. In fact I never did.

I had 2 ECGs both were normal. The update is I saw my GP today, he did asked me to keep a log of my symptoms, after reviewing my symptom log he kind of assured me that these symptoms are most likely due to my anxiety and stress. Additionally he was keen to refer me to psychologist. But we ended up me being referred to neurology hospital, where there are not only neurologist but also neuropsychologists too.
My GP commented that second neuro review will only be for my assurance but they will likely refer me to neuropsychologist which he thinks will be beneficial.

Let's hope for the best things go well with all of us.

I have not read your threat. What made you join this?

As soon as you said 'zoned out' I immediately thought of a sleep study. You could be having sleep apnea.

Hi

It could be, but I do get enough sleep mostly.

I have been a member since 2013 while I was awaiting 'confirmation' of my dx for MS. I kind of already knew that I had it, just needed to get the final say so from the doctors. Especially since I looked at my own MRI's, read the reports, and looked over my blood panels for my LP. After ten years of dealing with doctors without medical insurance and keeping track of how I was going along, it basically came down to it was either MS or I was my own disorder

Which honestly was a good thing, since 10 years ago my PCP at the time told me that I either had hemochromatosis (which oddly enough I still do have ), Lupus eh not too bad, MS okay getting a bit worse, MD ugh are you kidding me, or ALS why bother... As a way to try and explain a spontaneous fracturing of the L3 vertebrae with a bulging hernation to the disc. And the severe though completely unnoticed by me muscular spasms I was having. Which is how they believe my back broke, the muscles just kind of snapped it like a wishbone.

Not the most classic symptom of MS I will say, or of any of the possible dx's he gave me. It really wasn't classic of anything to happen to a then 25 year old. So he was pretty much pulling at straws to think of something, anything really that he could give me by way of explanation. But since I didn't have medical insurance at the time, it was also treated as a well... what can you do no matter what the reason for it is... you can't afford the testing and even if you could, you couldn't afford any treatments if there's any treatments even available. So here take 2 robaxins and pop a few morphine tabs and call me in the morning for a refill.

Morphine quickly changed to Lortab though since I didn't feel any pain on the morphine, which meant I wasn't taking it easy, until it wore off an left me crippled on the floor screaming in agony for the 2-3 hours before I could take my next dose. Please doc, lemme feel some pain.

And that went on for a while, pain pills that I rarely took unless I was starting to feel like I was going into shock from the pain, and what I thought at the time was a bunch of muscle relaxants (I'm now taking 4 different ones several times a day and they don't really do much of anything but try to kill off my liver, along with 2 anti-convulsents and an anti-depressant 'for pain'.)

It's entirely probable that I've had MS since childhood, but no way to ever really know on that, but my doctor did take some of my earlier medical records into account when trying to pick out the possibilities. ALS popped up into the mix because I did have repeat major concussions when I was younger with quite a few minor concussions. But honestly that was the only one that really scared me as a possibility. The rest of them were just like ugh, fine whatever. That one being in the list was like 'Ummm say what?'

As for my reasons for joining the boards, while there's a bit of the emotional support, probably tons more than I'll ever admit to or even realize . Mostly I just love knowledge, in any form and really any subject. So being here on the boards is not only a way to share some knowledge, but also to gain a lot of it. And not only pertaining to MS, there's plenty of people who might have similar experiences with completely different dx's that find their way to the boards here.

So don't feel as though you can no longer post because your doctor thinks it's just anxiety and stress... Trust me, anxiety is a big thing with MS and tons of other things, there might be a thread that can help you out by how someone else dealt with theirs, or you might be able to pass on some words of wisdom to the rest of us when you get yours under control. Same goes for stress, or a restless night's sleep. We all have our little bags of tricks, sometimes it might help someone else, sometimes it doesn't but hey feel free to share and read up on it and try what other's have.

Cup of chamomile tea before bed, a weighted blanket to curl under (courtesy trick of autism suffers which replaced swaddling for ease), a rubber band to snap around the wrist when feeling anxious, four way breathing to combat stress (another one stolen from asthma treatment which in turn was stolen from yoga which got it from martial arts) it's where you breath slowly in for the count of four hold it for the count of four, slowly breath out for the count of four and hold it for the count of four. In martial arts they do that before breaking the boards.

Of those tips, only the 4 way breathing works for me, I get too hot under covers and if chamomile worked I wouldn't still be up at 2:30 in the morning typing but it is very tasty. And the rubber band doesn't work for me because I pretty much snap it non-stop I have a compulsion to fiddle with things and end up with a bruise from it. But hey, that's just me, for my mother rubber bands work like a charm. And slip my aunt a cup of chamomile tea in place of her usual and she'll fall asleep mid-sentence after just a sip. Cover my father up with a heavy blanket and he'll be out cold until you rip the covers off of him.

Kamavi,

I am not a neurologist or a radiologist, so please take what I (or anybody else on the internet) have to say as being worth exactly what you paid me for it. With that said, here is one way to look at your MRI results. Yes, random spots can appear on MRIs with age. Just because they can appear and may be normal, does not mean they ARE normal in your case. In your case, you have some very non-specific symptoms that could be MS or could be something else entirely. Any doctor looking for the possibility of MS is going to use the McDonald diagnostic criteria. That criteria has specifics both in number and location of lesions appearing on an MRI as well as clinical symptoms and their distribution over time to consider before a doctor can give a diagnosis of MS.

In my case, I had total hearing loss in one ear that occurred one day while I was sitting at my desk and it lasted approximately 8 weeks. As part of looking for a cause for that, an MRI showed 2 lesions in the periventricular white matter. The periventricular white matter is a very common location for MS symptoms to show up, but it is not considered "diagnostic" by itself under the McDonald criteria, and the number of lesions I had also were not diagnostic alone, or with my one clinical episode of symptoms (hearing loss). So my neurologist explained to me that I didn't have enough lesions in the right places or enough symptoms for her to give me a diagnosis of MS.

I walked away from that appointment thinking that she thought I didn't have MS. I walked away thinking she had told me that the lesions I had were not in the right place or didn't look right to be MS. She also brought up the possibility of them simply being age related. So I went home thinking I didn't have MS and that we still had no idea why my hearing loss occurred. HOWEVER, she did ask me to keep track of any new or recurring symptoms that were out of the ordinary, and asked me to come back once a year for followup MRIs. Two years later, my 2nd followup MRI showed 5 more lesions, and she immediately said I now met the criteria (because of the number of lesions, including new ones separated by more than 6 months time) and she could give me a diagnosis of MS and start me on disease modifying meds.

So think carefully about the way the docs worded what they said to you. I mistakenly thought mine was telling me that she didn't think I had MS. But what she was really saying was that the number of lesions and my history of clinical symptoms didn't meet the McDonald Criteria. Your neuro may have meant the same thing in what they said to you. If you google the McDonald Diagnostic criteria for MS before your 2nd neuro opinion, and look into some of the websites showing "typical" locations for MRI lesions, you will have more information to use to ask better questions about what the doctor is telling you. If possible, get a copy of your MRI results on CD or DVD, and take them with you to the neuro appointment. Ask the neuro to show you the "hyperintensities" on the scan and discuss whether those locations are typical or atypical for MS.

Most of all, don't let whether you do or don't get a diagnosis right now discourage you. Spots on an MRI may be something or they may be nothing, and they are certainly not diagnostic of anything by themselves. So any diagnosis of what is causing your issues will be a process of elimination where they slowly rule out other causes over time. That is why the symptom log is important, and why additional followups (including possibly new MRIs) can be very important if you have new symptoms that could indicate different areas being affected by new lesions.

Keep checking in and letting us know how things are going and I hope you get some relief and some clarity about what is going on.

Oh sorry to hear that and really hope things get better with you. As you mentioned some of the techniques for controlling your anxiety but non of them worked for me. In fact I also attended therapy which was a waste of time.

Well that's so kind of you and very few people have such good thoughts as you have, educating people and make people aware of different symptoms. I will defo share my updates.

Anxiety is just another word for MS.

A word that can be said in polite company you mean, right?