can't sleep(waking pain), please help diagnose
I am in desperate need of a diagnosis. Last October (2017) I came down with a cold which seemed to be getting better by day 4 or 5 but by the end of day 5 I ended up waking in the middle of the night at around 2 or 3 am with severe diarrhea. Stomach was sensational and making a ton of noises and I was running to the bathroom every 10 minutes and having tons of water come out. This lasted until around 6 or 7 am and I was chugging water the entire time to stay hydrated. The following day I proceeded to endure chronic diarrhea at a rate of every 20-30 minutes. Day 3 things slowed down but I was still going to the bathroom every hour with tons of brown water coming out. Day 4 I was considering going to a doctor or hospital as I was getting dehydrated from the process but then towards the end of day 5 I started to have normal bowel movements again and was better by the next day. My cold seemed to linger through this process, picking up where it left off after the diarrhea and was gone in about 1 week. Also, my friends were sick and but did not have the diarrhea or end up with symptoms like mine. It might be important to note that my sister was diagnosed with mono around this time as well.
Symptoms:
Thought I was in the clear but then 2 weeks after the incident I started waking up in the middle of the night (after about 3 hours of sleep) with pain in my mid thoracic back area. At first I thought I might be sleeping in a bad position and mentioned it to my physical therapist who prescribed stretches for my back but the stretches offered no relief. During this time my appetite became insatiable and my calories doubled for a month or 2. As the weeks continued the pain started to become more intense and seemed to be spreading from the middle of my back around towards my ribs, primarily towards my right side (making it almost impossible to sleep on my right side once flared). The strange thing about this was that the pain only seems to be severe when lying down. Upon standing, the pain is reduced by 90% (resumes fully if I lay back down), and this pain seems to be only present after I have been sleeping for a few hours. After waking up and getting out of bed to presume my normal daily activities, the pain is entirely gone within 10 minutes and I feel 100% normal. I can do anything physical, even extreme stuff like handstand pushups and there is no pain. Another symptom I have been dealing with is excessive gas. It does not occur every single day but I find my self farting every 10 minutes for hours and hours on some days. Usually the farting will happen towards the end of the day after I have had a few meals maybe and it is very constant at night once I'm relaxed and maybe trying to go to sleep. After doing extensive searching online I learned about the difference between mechanical and inflammatory back pain and came across a condition known as ankylosing spondylitis, where some sufferers seemed to have similar symptoms of going to bed feeling good and then waking up to pain and having their sleep cut short, only to get up and feel 100% within a matter of minutes! The main probably I have had associating myself with this disease is that it seems to come on slowly and not just overnight the way the symptoms I'm experiencing did.
Diagnosis:
My health insurance sucks but I did schedule an appointment with my PCP after a couple of weeks of no improvement after symptoms began. I had to wait 3 months to see a doctor who could not give me a diagnosis but instead told me it could be anything from a collapse in my spine to parasites! I have since had both and xray and mri done as well as blood work, plus testing for gardia (came back negative). The xray and mri came out normal (no cracks, spine is straight, no hernia etc.), everything seems fine structurally. My blood work showed cortisol to be at 20 which is 1 point out of range on the high side. Both bad and good cholesterol were very slightly elevated but not significantly and the doctor told me he was not worried about it at all. The cortisol did seem to bother him a little bit though because I am young and he said he would like to see it go down and is having me get more tests done (another cortisol test as well as one for celiac and more
parasite testing). Also, my blood pressure is always really high (around 165/87) when I first see the doctor but then drops to maybe 135-145/80 after I chill for a bit. Doctor thinks white coat syndrome maybe.
Healing attempts:
After my first doctor visit (Jan 22) I tried a
parasite cleanse product (scram) with cloves,
Black-Walnut ,
Wormwood for a few weeks with no results. I then began taking turmeric extract and felt a 50% pain reduction within 1 week which allowed me to increase my sleeping from an average of 2-4 hours per night to 5-6 hours a night and I am now able to sleep more soundly but am still lacking and feeling sleep deprived. 2 months ago I started on the autoimmune paleo diet (no nuts/seeds, no legumes, no dairy, no grains, no nightshades, no eggs). I also started taking digestive enzymes 3x per day with meals and probiotics. I later added in boswellia and glutamine and also switched from probiotics to soil based organisms. Last month I started taking high doses of vitamin c (1 g each hour upon waking) and have tried colon/intestinal cleanse products for up to a month (cleansemore). Have also done a vitamin c flush on 2 separate days, spaced 1 week apart. I have experimented with different doses of baking soda. About 3 weeks ago I started taking 1/4 teaspoon of borax in a
quart of water sipped throughout the day. About 2 weeks ago I began adding certain raw dairy products into my diet thinking a boost in preformed vitamin a might help, mainly raw kefir milk, some raw butter and cheese, and a small amount of raw goat milk. My diet consists mainly of grass fed/pastured organic meats/organic veggies and snacks consist of sauerkraut, bone broth, and recently natto (fermented soybean, bacillus subtilis).
Results:
Nothing has significantly helped aside from the turmeric! There have been periods of what felt like improvement for 2-4 days at a time where pain was almost gone (90% better) but I am not sure why. The longest period of remission lasted 9 days, where day 8 and 9 was almost 100% improved, and that was when I started the soil based organisms. After 9 days though I flared up again. It has become very depressing because I was before an extremely active person, very fit and into the fitness lifestyle. I am 27 years old, 5' 10" 160lbs (was a ripped 180lbs before starting the diet), lean and muscular. I want to go back to training and eating the way I used to but I am so tired now due to lack of sleep all the time.
Please help:
Last thing to note, I have noticed on and off throughout this entire time some feeling or sensation in my left abdomen, like a feeling of fullness or pressure maybe 2
inches in diameter. Sometimes it feels like it might be where my spleen is maybe and other times a bit lower than that. When I started taking the borax and baking soda I noticed an increase in feeling in that area. A few days ago I started taking
Miracle-Mineral-Supplement and have noticed a big increase in feeling in that area to the point where I don't feel like laying on that area when I sleep (doesn't hurt, just feels like I'm laying on something). Currently I have been intermittently fasting (11 hours upon waking) and eating all my food usually between 5ish to 10-11pm at night. Other supplements I take are magnesium, some potassium with meals, b complex, selenium, zinc, and was doing a multi but ran out (ran out of soild based oragnisms also), and I eat some apple cider vinegar and garlic too.
Conclusion:
Sorry for long post, to sum things up I still wake up to pain somewhere in my mid back and slightly to the right side, pain seems to radiate from spine sort of. I've looked into reactive
Arthritis and the ankylosing spondylitis but I just don't know. Doctor says he would be able to diagnose AS from my mri but I would assume calcification might take time. Also, ReA should clear up within a year and it's been 7 months now with almost no improvement. Please help me figure this out!
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