What happened to me?

After the birth of my second child, my health suddenly began to decline. I lost around 1.5 litres of blood during labour and left the hospital anaemic for the first time in my life. My hb levels eventually became stable but I have battled with low ferritin ever since.

Around 6 weeks after giving birth, I began to have symptoms of an overactive bladder (never suffered previously) and to this day, it comes and goes. During the months that followed, I began to wake at night with heart palpitations and felt as though my heart was racing. Also experienced some shortness of breath which was scary. I also experienced on and off nausea. After around a year, I began to experience excruciating one sided headaches, dizziness, feeling faint, pins and needles, weakness, pvcs, fatigue...probably more symptoms. This was really scary but I managed to see a neurologist privately who did a brain MRI which was thankfully clear.

In October 2021 I contracted covid for the first time. Pretty bad infection and was bed bound for a week. It was then I began to notice the symptoms of POTS. 6 weeks after my covid infection I ended up with a sustained period of tachycardia and ended up in hospital with chest pain and pins and needles running down my left arm. Checked out fine, minus a temperature and infection markers for an unknown infection so that was that.

Got my booster vaccine in January 2022 (Moderna) and all hell broke loose. Woke at night with full body vibrations, loss of temperature control, fatigue, weakess, nausea, blurry vision, tremors, brain fog (all this lasted for around a month).

3 months later, my feet started to burn. This comes and goes to this day but I can go months between it happening. Got covid again December 2022 and didn't notice a particular worsening of symptoms. But by March 2023 I started to wake with intense nausea at night, suffer with intense brain fog/derealisation, low blood pressure, fatigue...the list goes on. Ended up taking 3 months off work (I'm a teacher).

Ironically, returned to work in July 2023 and ended up with covid AGAIN. Infection wasn't too bad but started to experience more frequent pvcs and a feeling of low blood sugar even though it wasn't...thankfully this would pass quickly.

Fast forward to now, I have dealt with all these symptoms on and off ever since then. But around the last 2/3 months, I now also believe that I am experiencing symptoms of MCAS. Sometimes, my nose will run (one side) when eating. Sometimes my throat will be sore. My ears and nose will burn randomly (they don't turn red) and feelings of nausea are back.

So to sum up! I clearly have dysautonomia, IST/POTS type symptoms, Small fiber neuropathy and now MCAS symptoms.

I've had 2x brain MRI's, 1x spine, Holter monitors, 2x echocardiograms, 2x nerve conduction tests, Several blood tests, Cystoscopy, Ultrasounds...everything checks out as fine. It is clearly not!

I know all this would be easy to pin on covid, but my symptoms started before...not long after my second pregnancy. I was always fit and healthy. Why has all this happened to me and why do I keep getting new symptoms?!

Any idess are really, really appreciated.