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Friday, November 26, 2010

Heart tremors, brain drain, and hypoxia?

For the past week or two I've had an increase or recurrence of a symptom that had disappeared, thankfully, but it's back. It is trembling in my chest around my heart area, especially first thing in morning, upon waking up. It's accompanied by a feeling that something is terribly wrong in my brain and a feeling like severe depression, but it's more like just distress. It does not have any cognitive counterpart such as worry or upset over a particular circumstance. It just feels awful, as if something is wrong physically. Associated with it is a high-speed (about 6 cycles/sec) tremor around my heart area, and slower heart palpitations. This is one of the symptoms that disappeared after taking IV antibiotics last year for six months (ceftriaxone).

It may be related to Candida, and I am going to go on a strict anti-Candida diet and see what happens. It also may have something to do with lack of sleep that I'm beginning to experience again. I only seem to be able to sleep at six hours a night now, whereas I had been up to nine hours in the past.
At one point in the past, I suspected that this problem might be the result of low oxygenation or hypoxia, due to sleep apnea. I have been tested at the Stanford sleep clinic three times during overnight stays. It was determined that I do have moderate sleep apnea. However, I was fitted with an oral appliance much like a retainer that one wears after having braces removed. There is a retainer for the top and another on the bottom teeth, linked together by a small, steel rod. The function of this system is to pull the lower jaw forward, thereby repositioning the tongue forward so there is less likelihood of its falling back into the throat and blocking the air passage.

It seems to work quite reliably, and is much more comfortable than wearing a CPAP machine, which I tried for a while and found unworkable due to its discomfort and the fact that it caused air to come rushing out of my mouth rather than into my lungs. I tried various kinds of masks including ones that covered my mouth, and even tried taping up my lips, as suggested by the doctor. All of the arrangements were untenable, so I chose the oral appliance.

I have a pulse-oximeter that I have worn many nights, to test my oxygen saturation level. It takes a reading every second. In the morning I plug it into a computer and get an analysis. Only rarely are there hypoxic episodes. O2 saturation of the blood is typically above 92%.

So, what is causing these symptoms? One fact is that this symptom of brain craziness or feeling that something is wrong re-emerges from time to time in variance with the antibiotics. Daily administration of 500mg IV Ceftriaxone (aka Rocephin) seemed to knock it out. So, it is possibly due to a bacterium such as borrellia (Lyme). Then there is possibly a variation that correlates with the amount of sugar I am eating, and thus the amount of Candida in my system. So perhaps it is yeast that is to blame. In any case, I suspect that apnea it is not the issue.

Questions remain: Why has it increased post HBOT? How will my recent addition of Valtrex (to address Epstein-Barr and HSV-6 viruses) affect things? Should I go back on IV? Stay tuned.

1 comment:

  1. I had this very same situation (including CPAP machine, curiosity about Candida, other supplements, or food effects.) In my case, I found meditation while it was fresh (strongly felt right there in bed first thing in the morning) while diving into the feeling revealed the interior of it and ultimately resolved it.

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