To think I’m dying? Any doctors around? 🙏

[Garret]

Got worse over a couple of weeks. Tiredness. Squishy tummy and no appetite. Aches and pains. Buzzing sensations all over. Back and neck pain. Joints hurting and clicking. Muscles twitching and hurting. Feeling wobbly. Now struggling to walk because of muscle burning pains. Anxiety and panic.

GP is totally unconcerned. Checked me over and said I haven’t lost muscle strength, range of movement, tone or sensation. Took some blood to test for vitamin deficiencies (I often have these but never felt like this before). Told me to address my anxiety and referred me to the psychiatric nurse.

I’m hysterical. Imagining I have some awful disease. How can the GP not be worried when I have such severe symptoms? Please help me if you can.

The doctor has sent me home and said no further treatment except anxiety meds and rest. Blood numbers for b12, ferritin and folate all look adequate. If I do have pernicious anaemia I won’t be able to access treatment.

As soon as I read you've had psoriasis it leaps out that that plus physically swollen joints would very often indicate psoriatic arthritis which would cause all your symptoms.

If not it honestly sounds like a virus or immune response combined with anxiety which can genuinely make you feel incredible physical symptoms. I do think you've got something else going on though.

There's an absolutely vast range of things that can cause this stuff from covid to viruses to bowel diseases or thyroid problems. They can be slow to pinpoint but they're not critical so you can calm down.

However physically swollen joints, does often point to arthritic disease and psoriatic arthritis is an obvious one. Something like 40% of people with psoriasis get psoriatic arthritis so this is almost a no brainer.

You can also get reactive arthritis after a virus. It's all easy to treat and no stress needed.

Request a rheumatology referral or pay a couple of hundred quid to see a private one. They can physically examine your joints to diagnose. It often won't show up in bloodwork

Treatment is steroids as well as some otter medications as well as diet, exercise and calming down the stress. ..

To reiterate: nothing whatsoever in anything you've described indicates serious or acute illness. You're fine!

Tonight it’s spread to my abdominal muscles. I can hardly sit up. My stomach is burning. But apparently according to three separate doctors I’m fine and don’t need help? I’m incredibly scared.

It sounds like health anxiety.

Three separate doctors have said you're fine so I'd be reassured that it's health anxiety.
I completely empathise as have difficulty myself accepting my physical symptoms as "just" anxiety.
I really think reading Claire Weeks Self Help for your Nerves would help. You can download on you phone and read in the Kindle app and I think it's cheap to get the Kindle version.
Have the doctors actually said you don't need help? They have prescribed me antidepressants and I'm on a waiting list for CBT for health anxiety.

@Garret Did you see the GP in person or was it a text message or phone call?

I saw two GPs in person, the third was a third party they used to check their conclusion so he didn’t examine me, but he did look at the results.

Nothing would make me happier than to believe this is just health anxiety. But I have 24/7 muscle pain so severe that I can hardly walk, and my hand muscles have swollen to the point that only my thumb and first finger can move. I don’t see how anxiety can cause that?

What did the doctors say is causing the swelling?
Muscle pain is common with extreme anxiety.
When I feel like I'm going to collapse or die and don't believe it's anxiety I go for a walk as either I will collapse and prove the doctors wrong and then get medical treatment or I prove myself wrong and am fine.

This is the book:
https://amzn.eu/d/1AhZmlO

No idea what’s causing the swelling. Their best guess is a virus. No idea what. My family keeps screaming at me to snap out of it because it’s just anxiety and I’m doing it to myself. I’ve tried going for a walk but after a couple of hundred metres the pain gets too severe to continue.

https://archive.org/details/selfhelpforyourn00week/

If anyone else needs help, the self help book that was mentioned above is available to read for free online.

Sorry to hear that your family are not supportive. Anxiety is a difficult enough illness without the people who should be supporting you making it worse with unhelpful comments. Has the GP referred you for any talking therapy or anything?
Have you tried progressive muscle relaxation? It's meant to be really effective but I keep forgetting to do it.

Have you been tested for psoriatic arthritis? Several people have mentioned that as a possibility, but you don't say what the GP said about that.

If you want to find someone who would check you privately, you can go to this page and search for a rhumatologist:

https://www.finder.bupa.co.uk/

Sorry to hear it's all still going on. Sounds really hard.

It's good that you can get out to the GP at least. If you can stand up and walk, and you are not losing consiousness or losing massive amounts of weight then that is good.

I'm also sorry that your family aren't being as supportive as needed, and that will possibly not help with your anxiety nor symptoms.

However, I have to say that you sound like your anxiety possibly is a cause (but not necessarily the main cause) of a lot of your physical symptoms, and I know from experience just how debilitating anxiety can be. I had huge problems with my anxiety after my head injury and post concussion syndrome in 2014 but that was partly because I was severely anxious about all the bizarre things like brain fog and tingling / slowed thinking etc which was of course, a result of being knocked on the head.

It was a catch-22 situation with my anxiety and insomnia being exacerbated by my TBI symptoms, and vice versa, and possibly this is why it became severe enough to give me a breakdown.

Anyway, I digress, and the point of my (pointless!) ramblings is to say that anxiety can indeed manifest itself very physically. But that's also to say that there can be a very real physical cause of anxiety too (in my case, altered brain function and chemistry from my TBI).

Don't give up OP, you'll get to the bottom of it, but try not to worry too much about each symptom if you can. Easier said than done, i know! 💖😉

Have you been tested for psoriatic arthritis? Several people have mentioned that as a possibility, but you don't say what the GP said about that

I just want to point out OP, that a "blood test" for this is pretty unreliable. GPs act like it is, but it's not. Forums and experiences show a very large percentage of sufferers will test negative. The best diagnosis is by a rheumatologist who can physically inspect your joints.

Hi @Garret

I just looked up the NICE guidelines on psoriatic arthritis.

This is the guide that GPs follow on assessing people with psoriasis:

https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg153/chapter/1-Recommendations#assessment-and-referral

This is the tool that they are recommended to use to assess people for psoriatic arthritis.

https://www.psoriasis.org/psoriatic-arthritis-screening-test/

Maybe you could work through that questionnaire, and if it suggests that you have psoriatic arthritis then it would help you to decide what to do?

That's a great idea.

Also, and I can't stress this enough, sources like the NHS can be really lacking for certain diseases like coeliac or auto immune conditions. they often focus on the five most common symptoms (which not everyone gets) and ignore the huge list of other very common things.

Coeliac for example is usually spotted with an upset tummy / weight loss etc and there's a heap of people who don't experience that at all and get a myriad of other confusing symptoms instead.

So what might help is joining an FB group on psoriatic arthritis or a forum and you can use the search function and probably see a lot of people have similar experiences.

I volunteer in a GP surgery and the senior doctor there told me that for chronic conditions they recommend that people look up the website of the charity that concentrates on their particular condition and get their detailed information from there. The charities often have a free helpline that you can phone for advice and they are often staffed by people who have the condition themselves or nurses who specialise in that condition. They give really good advice.

Examples of charities like that are:

https://www.bhf.org.uk/
https://www.asthmaandlung.org.uk/
https://www.dementiauk.org/

In this case, for psoriasis, it would be https://www.psoriasis-association.org.uk/

Other charities that also might give really helpful advice are https://www.cruse.org.uk/ for bereavement, and https://sepsistrust.org/, as I think Garret said she had lost a loved one to sepsis. I think they would help answer questions on that.

I hope that helps.

Also note that you shouldn't take iron within 4 hours of calcium supplements as it will not be as effective. Low iron can make you feel rubbish so make sure you are taking the iron properly. Also calcium can have side effects... so if there isn't another reason why it has been prescribed... maybe just get an over the counter vit d. Calcium Is much better absorbed through foods

Hi @Garret,

I just skim read that book that was recommended: "When the body says no" by Gabor Mate.

It's very good. It basically says that repressed emotion, and the inability to say "no" and set boundaries, is super-bad for people and can kick off autoimmune disease and cancer. I think it's well worth a read if you can get yourself out of under your current situation.