Muscle Twtiching/Fear of ALS ruining my life
Hello Everyone.. This is my first time visiting/posting here so bear with me. I am a 19 year old male that has lived with social anxiety in the past. It was very bad to the point where I would panic whenever I was put into certain situations with regular daily activities. Well what ended up happening was in the beginning of 2016 my fear/stress evolved into a whole different story I didn't think I would have to go through today.
It started one night when I was asleep in my bed. This was early January and I remember I was sleeping and all of a sudden my leg started to tingle really badly and I was curious to why it was happening. Well I don't know why but randomly I Pulled my phone out in the middle of the night and started to google my symptom and was flooded with tons of reasons to why it could be happening. For some reason my mind stuck to some of the scary things that I read... ALS/MS/Brain tumors etc... So all of a sudden in the middle of the night I started to panic like never before. I was sweating so bad and I felt this fear overcome me and ever since that night it hasn't been the same. I was fearing that I have a neurological disorder. That is when all the symptoms came into full blown affect. Behind my thighs I always had this burning/pulling painful nerve sensation that wouldn't go away. Terrible Heart Palpitations...My biceps would BURN when anything touched them. I had these electric shocks going everywhere along my body. When I started walking in the sun I would feel this really cold electrical current feeling across my body. I thought I was losing my vision because my eyes were going blurry, I thought I was seeing things and floaters everywhere.. My throat would close to the point where it felt like I couldn't swallow...and then there is the main symptom that has haunted me to this day...Wide body muscle twitching. Most of these symptoms were carried along with me for a good month and a half. I thought there was definitely something wrong with me and I need to do as many tests are possible. So I scheduled various blood tests/brain MRI's and went through with them. A lot of people say my muscle twitching could be due to dietary reasons but I disagree because everything came back very well in the blood tests and I have a relatively healthy diet. Now we are in mid February when I was living in total fear. I had lost 8 pounds in a month... going from 120 pounds down to 112. I just had no appetite what so ever. I went ahead and did my brain MRI and everything came back clear so that cleared up my other fear of having a brain tumor because I got very sharp headaches while going through this. My eyes were checked and the doctor said they are very healthy.
So blood tests and MRI came back clear everything should be good now right? WRONG...now is when my fear took a whole new level. ALS has been my biggest nightmare. I basically educated myself so much on it that I convinced myself I am going to have it. My muscle twitching still has not stopped until this day. Sometimes it is in my bicep with big thumps and sometimes I can see it barely under my skin without feeling it. Sometimes it will stay in the spot for some time or it will immediately jump and tic my back or my thigh or my leg. Pretty much anywhere and everywhere I can think of. It's literally moving my fingers/toes making them jump up randomly. Sometimes I get twitches that feel like a machine gun just shooting in my neck or arm. Most of the time its like 1 tic and then it will do 1 tic in another spot and keep shifting. Basically it twitches in many different ways and it has been driving me nuts! All I have been thinking about is this deadly disease that spreads like wildfire causing the worst possible death I have ever heard of and I have been having nightmares about this. My muscles aren't weak per say but it just feels tired all the time. It's driving me crazy because I feel like I'm going to wake up the next morning and the nerves in my hand are dead or my foot and I can't take this anymore. 3 months of twitching has been driving me crazy.
People say in ALS the twitching is barely noticeable but when I was watching this youtube video of a guy who was diagnosed with ALS I could clearly see the muscle twitching in his bicep and it looked EXACTLY like mine did. This made me panic and my heart was racing thinking I have the disease however I noticed that the arm he was twitching you could clearly see the atrophy and all the muscle lost. He said the fingers in that arm were unusable and he could barely hold the arm up however his bicep was twitching like big thumps. I want to find happiness in my life but every time I feel like I'm having a good time the ALS fear pops into my head and I go back into depressive state all over again because I think I'm going to die the worst way possible. Literally not a day has gone by without my constant muscle twitching and it scares me so bad. I understand I am only 19 years old and it is very rare but my mind just doesn't want to forget about it. People say keep my mind busy but whenever I do ALS just pops back in and ruins my life. Working everyday has been a struggle, I haven't been going to school because of my social fear and now on top of everything my health fear. Sometimes I still do have nerve pain behind my thighs and weird feelings that come and go however the twitching is apparent and just won't go away...and Yes I have heard of Benign fasciculation Syndrome and I believe it could be that BUT then I go online and read scary things of people saying they heard of people twitch for years and then develop ALS or that the twitching was occurring BEFORE atrophy and weakness then BOOM. I am very scared and I don't know how to handle this.
I think of it like a nightmare fantasy. We all have those fantasies in our head of the perfect life but when we snap back into reality it was just a thought and nothing more. What are the chances those fantasies will be real? Probably very low. So it's kind of like that but instead of a fantasy it is a nightmare. HOPEFULLY I can say chances are even lower but my mind just is thinking it is doomed with this deadly neurological disorder.
