A few years ago I seemed to have some mysterious illness, well at least it felt like an illness. There were no major life threatening symptoms but I just had an overall general feeling of being unwell. 

Some of my symptoms were as follows:

• Tired all the time, even when getting 8+ hours of sleep at night
• Body aches, specifically in joints
• Loss of strength (it was measurable because I used to lift weights frequently and I could not lift the same weight I had been lifting previously)
• Hair shedding
• Getting fatigued very easily when performing every day tasks
• Strange eye problems where they seemed to be dry and bloodshot all the time

As you can see it was a decent sized list of non specific symptoms and they all just kind of came on gradually. Nothing seemed to happen overnight, it just seemed like over time I would notice a few more things that I hadn't notice before symptom wise, and they seemed to be gradually getting worse. 

This all doesn't seem like that big of a deal but I was only 26 years old at the time and had been a top notch athlete my entire life and in peak physical condition up to that point. So, something was definitely going on... but what?

As you can imagine, the first thing I did was go to a doctor. 

The doctor did all the usual tests. He ordered a complete blood panel, tested for different viruses, tested for all kinds of arthritis's, and even tested for different cancers. Much to my surprise everything came back normal, and not just mostly normal, but literally in every test my results were smack dab in the middle of the "normal range".

This was both a relief and a frustration. It was a relief that I didn't have some kind of disease or cancer, but it was a frustration because that didn't provide any answers to why I was feeling the way I was. 

What next?

Not really knowing what to do next I asked the doctor to refer me to an endocrinologist to see if maybe there was something going on with my hormones or my thyroid. After seeing an endocrinologist and having him perform a battery of tests I was still no closer to an answer. Every test he performed came back "normal" as well. 

His response, was something along the lines of, "you are a young man, maybe you just worry too much."

That was not really what I wanted to hear because I knew that it wasn't just all in my head. I wasn't just "worrying". I could physically feel pain in my knees and ankles and I would physically be out of breath when I walked up the stairs. Both unusual things considering the kind of physical shape I had been in previously.

Back to the drawing board.

Next I went back to my original doctor and told him the results from the endocrinologist and he decided we better test for some more obscure things. Things like lime disease, valley fever, or basically just any kind of virus that we could think of that we hadn't tested for yet. All came back normal. 

On to the next doctor.

He then sent me to a rheumatologist since most of my major symptoms seemed to be musculoskeletal in nature. 

The rheumatologist tested for all different kinds of arthritis's but came up empty yet again. Every test showed me smack dab in the middle of the normal range. He even did an x-ray of my knees, lower back, and ankles to see if there was anything we could see there that we might be missing. 

When the results came in, he just sorta laughed to himself as he read them aloud to me. He said, "you know, most of my patients would kill to have x-rays like this. Your knees look perfectly healthy."

Again it was a relief that there was nothing major wrong with me, but it was getting very frustrating to hear time and time again that nothing is showing up as being out of whack when I know there definitely is something out of whack. Hearing doctor after doctor say, to not stress so much, and you are perfectly healthy, starts to get old after a while...

My health was going to have to be in my own hands!

Realizing that I wasn't getting anywhere with doctors I decided to take my health into my own hands. I began researching the internet for other people who seemed to be going through similar things as me. 

The closest thing I could find were many people complaining about something called Fibromyalgia or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. My symptoms seemed to align pretty well with either one of those. So, I took this new found information and I went back to my doctor and asked him what he thought.

He told me that Fibromyalgia matched up decently well with a lot of my symptoms and that it is basically a malfunction of the nerves sending messages to the brain. They are sending signals of pain and discomfort to the brain when really there isn't anything physically wrong where they should be sending those messages. As a result, I end up feeling pain when I shouldn't be. 

That seemed like a possibility but it was very odd to me that all the sudden out of no where my nerves and brain would start "miscommunicating" like that. For 26 years they were working fine and then randomly they start not working fine? I am a cause and effect kind of guy and that just didn't really make a lot of sense to me...

The doctor started telling me how he would like to prescribe a medication for me to kind of weaken those signals being sent to my brain to help with the pain and that I would likely have to take that medication for the rest of my life in order to reduce the pain I was feeling. Not something that sounded appealing to me in the slightest. 

I told the doctor that I would wait on the medication and try some more natural remedies first. 

I was going to try and get healthy my way first!

After going back and scouring the internet and doing plenty of research I began taking a plethora of multivitamins and supplements all touted to help something or another related to fibromyalgia. After a couple weeks of that I was feeling maybe 10% better, a negligible and non acceptable amount. 

Next, I would try different stretching and light workouts that I read about to relieve some of the pain and discomfort. I did yoga and tai-chi daily. I admit that I did feel better after doing those exercises, but maybe only about 30% better. It definitely didn't fix the problems but it certainly helped me feel better. 

I wasn't after a 30-40% improvement in my symptoms though, I was after a cure. Now how do I go about getting one? 

The rest will be continued in Part II tomorrow...

Image Sources:

http://www.hayleycamille.com/2017/01/31/an-invisibility-cloak-for-your-brain/

http://www.salon.com/2015/11/22/everything_is_fine_with_your_thyroid_the_doctor_told_me_youre_just_stressed/

http://doctoredebi.blogspot.com/2015/11/i-am-not-feeling-well-in-my-body-yet-my.html

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/858815

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/72690981461858514/

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