Okay, ALSO chronic fatigue
So… it’s still chronic fatigue. It just looks like it knocked out my adrenals for a few days. So, yeah. Still this bs puzzle to solve.
I wanted this to be the end. MCAS should be bad enough, yeah? Adrenal insufficiency bad enough. Hashimotos, dystonia, brain fog, ADHD executive dysfunction, blah, blah, blah. I keep coming back to the vagus nerve. It turned my adrenals back on today. Vagus nerve stimulation to both tragus of the ear for 1/2 hour. Knocked me out, and when I woke up I was shaking from adrenaline rushing through me as the adrenals did their thing, brought my blood pressure back up, turned on all the systems like a reboot to an organic computer.
I’ve been experimenting with vagus nerve stimulation for years since I was living out of my car with screaming face pain and chemical sensitivity (which turned out to be MCAS). It was the only thing that allowed me to get back in the house. I thought it was focused on the immune system because of all the allergies and MCAS. I thought the dystonia was part of the immune system problem because of how it showed up when I was knocked out by allergies. But those adrenals are connected to the vagus nerve — all organs are. The immune system, the digestive system, olfactory — the whole sensory issue thing with skin numbing, lack of temperature sensory data. It’s all connected to the vagus nerve.
I actually stopped vagus nerve stimulation some months back because I was only noticing how it made me tired and seemed to knock out things that were currently working. I found it counterproductive, especially when the MCAS was raging. Now… now I just see it pointing to the problem.
There are chronic fatigue specialists out there. A whole crew in the hospital in Boston my dad used to work at. I just don’t know if I can survive the stress of trips to Boston, never mind be able to get in with such a program. But I think I need to do something, soon. If there’s a deadline on my adrenals, where without constant stimulation they can fail permanently, I want to get this figured out before my secondary adrenal insufficiency can become primary. The MCAS raging in my system was ensuring adrenaline was flooding me. Treating the MCAS has stopped the adrenaline. It might be why my adrenals are fluctuating now without anything to remind them to wake up.
It’s all theory. I’m not a doctor or scientist, just a very exhausted patient 11 years into this mystery keeping me from living my life. But chronic fatigue isn’t just the label they slap on patients too stubborn to get better anymore. It’s an actual specialty with research and new answers. And the vagus nerve seems to be in the middle of a lot of that research.
There’s that bastard, hope, still clinging on by the fingernails, no matter how bad this goes, how depressing each dead end leads. Shouldn’t treating all those other problems be enough? Nothing feels like enough…
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