Another bloody symptom!

Flippin' heck I'm getting really fed up of this not to mention scared! It seems like every day brings a new and horrible symptom. Now I can't wee properly. I have a doc's appointment this afternoon although I'm not sure if he'll be able to do anything and a hospital appointment with the consultant on Wednesday which can't come soon enough.
What a journey. I want to go home to England where I can deal with this around the people I know and love. :-(

At last- a diagnosis!!!!!

Yay! I finally got a diagnosis of POTS on Thursday. They didn't even need to do the scheduled tilt table test I was there for. Just a series of supine, followed by standing b.p. readings plus an odd test I don't know the name of which required me breathing into a plastic tube connected to a pressure gauge whilst trying to blow hard enough to get it up to a red line drawn on the glass of the gauge and keep it there whilst feeling like my head and lungs were going to explode. The doctor also took a detailed history from me and examined with interest my weird hyper-mobile joints, flat feet and tongue that can reach the tip of my nose whilst some other dude took photo's (which better not end up on the internet!) of my bendy abilities.
I wish I could write more and I hope if/ when I'm feeling better I'll recoup some of my mental energy but at the moment I'm as flat as a car battery after the ordeal of the last eight months or so. Well, a lifetime really but especially the last eight months since arriving in Australia. It's so weird, I'm reflecting on so much and like the Radiohead song- it really is like a jigsaw falling into place.
I have to go back to the hospital on Tuesday to see the consultant in these matters as I'm told he'll really want to see my knees!

will somebody tell my husband that to be a carer you have to care!

Things have been really strained and heavy around here this weekend. I was really looking forward to my husband being at home for four days but it just hasn't worked out that way at all. He's been doing what he usually does and projecting his unhappiness towards everyone else in some sort of passive aggressive manner which fills the room with a toxic invisible gas that makes everyone feel ill. I can feel and see his anger and resentment towards me like it was made of clay yet he denies it repeatedly and then gets defensive and mean and starts shouting so I don't know which is worse, the silent treatment or the shouting. They're both equally horrible really.
I am so fed up of this.

depression sucks and so does dysautonomia!

I am so depressed today. I have been intermittently for the last few weeks since I started getting really sick but it's getting worse by the day. It's really not helped by the fact that I feel so damned ill all of the time and that it seems to be getting worse. The doctor started me on some anti- depressants on Friday because he's still convinced that my problems are confined to depression and anxiety. I keep trying to tell him that they are just symptoms of what is really going on i.e. dysautonomia but he's having none of it at the minute. Depression and anxiety are things I've lived with quietly for nearly 20 years and I know the difference. So frustrating!
I keep asking for an MRI scan and a referral to a neurologist but he wants to have a go at 'fixing' me first I think. Thank God I managed to get a referral out of the 'mad as a box of frogs' doctor I saw the other week. Maybe not that mad eh?
I get a couple of hours a day feeling relatively 'normal' at the moment if I'm lucky and the rest are spent feeling light headed, sick and mentally as foggy as a cold night in November in a Yorkshire mining town- not that there are any of them any more.
The worst of it for me is having to look at my children knowing they don't know what's coming yet and are thinking that I'm going to recover soon and be back to how I was before, although I think the older two have suspicions that things are worse than that.
Why is life so fecking hard? I'm quite sure I didn't subscribe to this.

yet another fruitless doctor's appointment.

Ho hum. Another day of feeling ill and not being taken seriously by the doctor. I wish for one minute they'd see the person in front of them and just empathise a tiny little bit without slapping the all encompassing label 'anxiety' on them. It's just soooo frustrating!
I have two hospital appointments coming up and a neurologist's appointment at the end of November for which I need to be armed with the results of an MRI scan but will they issue me with a referral for one? No is the answer  to that question. So, potentially, I could turn up for my appointment then be told I need one and have to wait another six to eight weeks for that appointment as I keep getting sicker. God I'm fed up with it all.
I decided to start this blog as a way of keeping sane throughout the challenges this illness is bringing me with but I'm not sure how successful it will be! The worst of it is, I know what's wrong. Deep down I do but no one's listening.