Worsening Brain Symptoms for Over 4 Years - Thyroid Disease?
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Hi everyone! I'm 26 years old, male and for 4 years now, I've had an undiagnosed illness which has completely destroyed my life, increasingly more so as it continues to worsen as time goes on. There's a long, growing list of symptoms but the main ones causing me problems are: constant tiredness and weakness, severe "brain fog" which continues to worsen, flatlined emotions (anhedonia) which also steadily worsen, a bunch of headaches and horrible feelings in my head (which I can only relieve by taking codeine), sleep problems (which come and go at random) and various heart arrhythmias (sudden SVT attacks, bigeminy during exertion) and exertional breathlessness. Other worrying symptoms include a heavily swollen/bloated abdomen, fat loss/muscle waste on my arms are legs and constant dryness and thirst despite taking loads of water.
This condition started off in June 2016 with a flu-like illness which was likely I virus or bug I caught. I basically woke up feeling ill and was unable to do my college work because my brain suddenly wouldn't work, couldn't remember anything off the top of my head and my head just hurt trying to. And once my virus/bug cleared up within a week by taking the usual hot drinks, lemsips etc, this "brain fog" just stayed and kept getting worse. After about a year and a half this, all the other symptoms I mentioned started developing and worsening along with the brain fog and continue to do so as I speak. With these brain issues, my brain seems to be slowing down and having to work harder and strain itself to think and process anything. As this has worsened over the years, my brain now feels under constant strain all the time, hurts and feels horrible in ways difficult to describe. And the only thing I can do to relief it somewhat is to numb my brain of these horrible feelings by taking codeine tablets. It's lead to anhedonia now as well which continues to worsen, likely because my brain has to hurt and strain itself to process emotions along with everything else, I can tell this is nothing to do with depression, just the result of my brain being weak, tired and slow. My eyes are suffering from this as well and feel like I have constant eyestrain all the time, with my vision being dimmed and slow to interpret images.
Before this happened, I was completely healthy, ate a good diet, never smoked, never took drugs and didn't drink much.
I've had all the usual basic routine blood tests (diabetes, thyroid, cortisol, liver/kidneys) done over and over again by many different doctors which all come back fine, my iron and B12 were also checked I'm sure but were fine. I also had a CT scan of my brain and a test for Lyme disease which came back negative.
I then seen a neurologist (after an 8 month wait) who just asked my a bunch of questions, shined a torch in my eye, tapped my arms with a pin then said he couldn't do anything. He then sent me off in another long wait to see a neuropsychologist who I just seen recently during the coronavirus lockdown. The psychologyst suggests that my condition is a Functional Neurological Disorder and told me that I'll likely spend the rest of my life trying to diagnose my condition. And on my medical records, it was basically put down as a psychosomatic illness. I really have my doubts about this as the doctors seem to have done very little investigating this condition and have made barely any progress at all. It's been over 4 years now and there's not even one single clue to what could be causing my illness. And I suspect that poor testing and negligence from doctors has more to do with this than my illness being a mystery.
Looking at my thyroid, it appears the doctors have only been checking TSH almost the entire time, although they did initially check my T4 when they started investigating my illness. Going by this, I reckon there's still a good possibility of this still being a thyroid condition. I hear more and more that thyroid problems are often the culprit with brain fog and cognitive problems, including the kind I'm getting which isn't affecting my memory or intellectual abilities/skills at all and is just making my brain gradually slow down and have to work harder process things. And the heart rhythm issues, the SVT attacks in particular, are apparently a common symptom of a thyroid disorder as well, the only other condition I could find to cause these was an electrolyte imbalance and trivial things like too much caffeine, alcohol, anxiety etc. I've seen several people on forums with similar complaints to mine. They also turned out to have a thyroid problem and said they were amazed at how quickly their brain symptoms went away after treatment, after basically thinking they were dying for over a year or so.
Has anyone here experienced brain symptoms like mine, have any thoughts on what this could be, and would be able to tell me if my thyroid is a likley culprit here? Thanks once again!
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