BRAIN ZAPS ARE KILLING ME!! NOT KIDDING!

I am very happy that Lyrica is helping you. I had been on Lyrica about 10 years ago, but the side effects were intolerable.  I got such blurry vision that I could no longer make out shapes or read.  But Lyrica has been the ONLY drug that treated my face pain, so I'm going to ask my eye doctor about what happened to me while taking the Lyrica. I'm having cataracts removed soon, so maybe they played a part in the blurry vision I experienced.  Blurry vision is even one of the side effects that is mentioned on TV when there is a commercial about Lyrica.

I sure didn't like reading that your pain doc is not considering your symptoms.  Pain is pain, and it must be treated, and doctors are obligated to find out what the best treatments are for their patients. In Dorothy's note to me, she mentioned holistic practioners.  This is something I have been considering. Osteopathic doctors are amazing in how they treat the "whole" patient, not just the symptoms you come in with.  Maybe give it a try.  I sure am going to try.  Get copies all of your medical records so that any new doctor you see will have your medical history on hand. Patients are notorious for not remembering important things to say while at the doctor's office, especially if the doc appears in a hurry.

Good luck Mary.

Dorothy, Thank you very much for replying to my post.

I agree that taking a holistic or osteopathic path would be better for me, and I have given it much thought.  However, I have so many different diagnoses that I wouldn't know where to start.  I have begun obtaining my medical records from all of the specialists I see, but it is a cumbersome and expensive project.

One thing that I read in many of the discussions is that most people have these shocks for only a minute or two or maybe a bit longer, but mine last for hours and worsen over time until I literally pass out. I can't walk, my balance is completely off, my speech is slurred, and my body feels like I have no bones inside my arms and legs. I can no longer drive a car, so my 1994 black Camaro sits in the garage covered over to protect it, but sometimes I sit in it and pretend. I drove to Aspen Colorado yesterday during my dream trip. Oh, I've gone so many places and will continue to go many more places if my neurotransmitters done shut me down completely. I'm trying to get to Alaska next.

I'm 66 years old – luckily now on Medicare – but in 2001 I was placed on full disability because of all my problems. What was kind of funny about this is that the judge who made the final decision that I was disabled said in his letter that it must be considered that she is “approaching advanced age”. I was 53 at the time – jeepers. It drives my husband crazy but I still have the heart and soul of an 18 y/o old and sometimes act like it – I'm a people person and he is not.

Besides these brain shocks I get, I also have trigeminal neuralgia, which is damage to the 5th cranial nerve (there are 12), and my neuralgia was caused by a misplaced needle by a dentist giving me a novocaine shot on the bottom right side of my jaw. This was in 1999 and it took about a month or so for the symptoms to really flare up. It is like having a flame thrower being shot at the right side of my face from my chin all the way up to my forehead and into my right eye. The pain is indescribable, and if you read up on it, you will find that it is called the suicide disease. I've seen many neurologists and pain management doctors, and have had numerous MRIs, but none of them showed anything. For the horrible pain I get from the neuralgia, I have been on morphine, codeine, baclofen, Lyrica, and Valium. I had to stop the morphine and the Lyrica due to very bad side effects, and the Lyrica actually took almost all of the neuralgia away, but it caused me such blurry vision that I could no longer make out shapes or words. The morphine I just didn’t like taking. It's a strong pain reliever, so why didn't it relieve my pain. Now I only take Norco and Valium. I have also undergone nerve blocks called stellate ganglion blocks where steroids are injected into the nerve bundle in the brain stem from which the trigeminal nerve root begins and then from there it follows a path up the side of the face and sometimes into my scalp. They never did any good – and they were very costly.

Regarding these brain shocks (which I call 'zingers', my son found out some information on the internet that the combination of Celexa (for depression) and Seroquel 25 mg (low dose) for sleep could be messing up the neurotransmitters (especially serotonin) in my head, which are what are being affected when the zingers occur. The Celexa does not have something called a “half-life” (?) so it stays in my system most of the day, so when I take the Seroquel at 10 PM, the two drugs interact inappropriately. The overacting neurotransmitters are definitely the cause of the brain shocks, but no doc I have talked to has any idea what to do. And I give all of them copies of what I print out online.

The trigeminal neuralgia is totally unrelated to the brain shocks – which are caused by the neurotransmitters firing off kilter as I mentioned above. The only way to diagnose or study these brain shocks would be for me to have an EEG done right when I'm having the zingers. I was in the ER two weeks ago with my hands trying to pull my head off of my neck because of the pain. My husband told the doc about the neuralgia, but when I tried to explain what I was experiencing and that I was NOT having an attack of the neuralgia at this time I came across as a blubbering idiot. She felt that I was having a generalized anxiety attack and an attack of the neuralgia. So she sets me up for a CT scan and gives me a 2 mg IV push of morphine. I begged her to do an EEG right then, but she had never heard of these brains zaps, so to her I was just a crazy lune having face pain. I printed out tons of articles about brain zaps and sent them directly to this ER doc, and I hope she has read them.

I also have scleroderma and many of the “overlap” syndromes, including heart and lung problems along with osteoporosis and an almost complete shutdown of the gastric motility which our bodies rely on for our food to go from top to bottom. The full gastric motility from the minute you swallow to when it travels through the digestive tract and then out the back door has a “snake-like” movement that the digestive tract needs to help wiggle the food through your system. I have found enough soft foods (oh, the Yoplait vanilla yogurt is heaven and I eat up to 6 a day) to eat so I'm not starving. Milk shakes/malts have been a life-saver, especially strawberry. Yumm.

Well, this became too long of a reply note but I heartily thank all of you wonderful but unfortunate people who suffer from these electrical shocks for taking the time to read what I had to say. Let's hope that some doctors will consider these disruptions of our neurotransmitters as worthy of study, even if they just come to understand what is occurring.

don't bother about your old notes ...start again with support from someone new...who won't abuse you.

try lovely warm baths soaking in epsom salts...i reckon you have a crisis of magnesium...take as much as you can. imposs to overdose...just gives you the runs ...often a great thing...so its used to relieve constipation. hope this helps.

love marey xxxxxxxxxxxxx