sarahanxiety
New member
Hi everyone, advice and reassurance needed please! Okay, I haven't posted in nearly a year and my wonderful experience with twitching started over a year ago. First with an eyelid twitch, then a brief lip twitch, then a meeting with "dr. Google" (i.e. freak out time!) then body wide twitches. I mean last year, you could see those big thumper twitches in my calf, lower thigh, triceps, one day it happened in my thumb. I also have had abdominal, buttocks, rib, and neck twitches transiently and once a thumb twitch (which scared the bejezzus out of me last year!) I have thankfully never had any weakness or any significant neuro symptoms -only periods where the health anxiety about these bloody twitches kept me up at night ; Oh yeah, I also run 5k 2-3 times a week, not something that a poor unfortunate person with ALS could do. My body wides twitches are pretty quiet for the last ten months. i mean I still get them and an occasional buzzing feeling in my upper thigh or above the knee. I also had an eyebrow twitch once only last a few minutes.My bodywide twitches I guess don't bother me because they tend to be transient and occur after exercise. But this eye twitch! Lemme tell ya, its the bane of my existence! The (boring sorry) story of my eye twitches is as follows. Last year, October 2012,one week twitch upper right lid, which stopped for about 6 months. Then April 2013 lower inner corner left eye lid for like 6 weeks(freak out time again but stopped, funnily while on holidays in the USA!). Left eye lid started again intermittently in August 2013 for about 4 weeks and stopped. However, for the last 6-8 weeks weeks my upper Right lid has been at it again. There were times I thought it would go away BUT since yesterday it has increased in frequency, and is happening nearly every 2-3 minutes-although the twitch looks less pronounce if I touch my eyelid I feel the buzzing. Now my left corner eye lid has been playing up a bit to since yesterday. Has anyone had eyelid twitch so persistent? Has anyone had both eye lids playing up at both times?I had a massively stressful day at work yesterday and life has been pretty stressful over all-this twitch does not help things! I am not worried about a*s, but mind mind is running away with itself about other things, MS,brain tumour, BEB. Incidentally, last week i showed my eye twitch to my mom, who is a medical doctor of 50 years experience. My mom said:"that's just a simple fasciculation...you are tired and stressed!" My mom was not worried. I showed her the aboutbfs website, she turned to me and said: "This is what you have, this bfs!" Then she turned to me in typical mom fashion and said :"So for Godsake why are you not reassured?!Maybe you need a psychiatrist!" Guys thanks you as ever for your support. I may not have posted but believe me I was with you over the last year. Sorry for the rant.
GlowGreen
) -yes anxious guy you are so right-after a year of twitching I would be far more symptomatic if it was something other than bfs. The sad thing is that I am a medic, you would think I should know this! I guess logic goes out the window with health anxiety. Funnily my mom told me in the late 60's , during a time of intense life stress, she thought one leg felt "dead" and had a bit of an MS fear. However, back in 1968, there was no dr Google. She asked a fellow trainee doc at the hospital to examine her-just a clinical exam, there was no CT or MRI available, he told her in two minutes "you don't have MS, its stress"-she believed him and got on with her life. I think that sometimes we have too much information at our fingertips nowadays.
) twitching is a somatic response to anxiety/stress/trauma so if you have health anxiety it is even more likely that the cause of your twitching isn't sinister (and it is already really unlikely because of that 2/100,000 stat.).I'll probably get a b*ll*king from someone on this forum for being insensitive to someone with health anxiety but 1 in 3 people get cancer, worrying about that makes a lot more sense than worrying about twitching.We'll all get ill, but at this point in history (and with the wonderful NHS) we can hope to live long, healthy lives. It would be a shame to waste them worrying, especially about something so unlikely as ALS (with or without twitches).Sorry if I am wittering on, I just to hate to think of someone so worried when it isn't justified. Hope you get the health anxiety under control soon.
By the way, my eye twitching has weirdly disappeared after all those weeks! Mid day Saturday, about 4 hours after posting this post, twitches started to go away, having reached a zenith on saturday morning pre -post. Did posting on aboutbfs give me some weird catharsis that broke the anxiety? Lord knows. best wishes guys and thanks