HSP and illnesses

I'm very similar, but very different to you and most of the other replies. Yet it seems we all know something’s wrong within our bodies, whether someone listens or not.

Most of you get pain (which I am sorry to hear, it must be awful) that forces you to keep trying to figure things out. The pain sometimes leads to the solution because you can describe it.

I feel like I'm just wasting time and money because I feel things before they are emergencies.

I'm opposite, where I'm wasting time and money because I didn't feel pain that might have caught something super early. Then it's a huge amount of money at once that I can't really afford, plus maintenance care for the further progressed disease that wasn't caught early enough to do anything about.

Like you, I’m hyper aware of whatever’s going on in my body. I can tell within 5 minutes of eating something whether my body liked it or not, but the big stuff is different.

I have a ridiculously high pain tolerance. It’s not where I don’t feel pain, more like I’m a 2/10 where most people complain of a 9/10. But it has leads to similar problems where doctors don’t believe me either when I tell them something's wrong, insisting it’s really something. They write me off because I’m not showing any pain or it’s so minimal they think it doesn't matter.

I also don’t get symptoms, making it very difficult to attempt any self-diagnosis online. The "possible symptoms" list is never accurate for what I am experiencing.

Once I lost almost all feeling in both legs and ended up using a cane (in my early 20s) to keep from falling. Finally went to the ER because he didn’t go away and got admitted, where the MRIs revealed dozens of legions on my brain and spinal cord. I had one doctor stare at me for a long time, while I’m just being in a super bubbly happy mood, and he told me point blank that I should have been paralyzed from the neck down from what he saw on my MRIs. That’s what his experience has shown him, while he stared at me like a medical oddity. But I was fine otherwise, got better in 2 days and so they sent me on my way with a “we think, um, there’s a chance, uh, possibly… it could be… MS… maybe.”

Not very helpful. Turned out it was MS and I lost my right eye sight less than a year later and all sense of balance which greatly reduced my life in every way. All because it wasn’t diagnosed back then.

Unfortunately, that’s what tends to happen to the opposite side of your coin. It’s never found until it’s too late to really do anything about it. Then it's chronic and you're left dealing with it for the rest of your life. :(

/r/hsp Thread