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Hi everyone,
I’m new to this BB, which I’ve just discovered, but not new to Grave’s which I’ve had for several years and for which I underwent radioctive iodine treatment three years ago. I’m in the UK, so some of the names of drugs and treatment processes are different, but essentially, the treatments seem similar. My question concerns muscle jumps, from which I suffer to varying degrees. I suffered from these before the radioctive treatment and now I occasionally still get bouts which can be quite irritating. Usually, its just the muscles in my legs which are affected and can be bad enough to be noticable, causing jerks of the leg. Worse than this, once or twice the jumping has become so bad (involving arms and legs in involuntary spasms) that I’ve felt I was going to have a full scale seizure of some sort. One doctor explained this as a panic attack, saying that I was hyperventilating and that the muscles weren’t getting enough oxygen. I’ve suffered panic attacks and it doesn’t really feel like this. Can anyone shed any light on this?I take artificial thyroid hormone (known as thyroxine in the UK).
Zoogirl
Hi, Zoogirl, and welcome to the Board:
Muscle jumps are not a part of my experience with Graves, so I may not be of much help here. The thought occurred to me that it was unlikely that any doctor has been able to observe one of these episodes, which makes it harder for him/her to determine what is going on. So there’s guesswork involved in the response. Others of us on the board have had similar situations, and I’m thinking of one person in particular who kept having pronounced hyper symptoms periodically and yet the bloodwork, etc., did not show a problem. She began to keep a symptom log, in which she recorded when these symptoms occurred. It made it possible for her doctor to find the REASON why the episodes were occurring, rather than simply writing her off as hypochondriacal. You might consider trying something like that yourself. If you can tie the muscle jump episodes into any type of trigger, whether it is “time of month”, foods eaten, lack of food, alcohol consumed, medications taken, long work hours, lack of sleep, etc. you might be taking a giant step to figuring out why they occur, which could also help your doctor. There also might be some way for you to test the doctor’s hypothesis about hyperventilation. If there is some way to counteract hyperventilation episodes (I’ve heard somewhere that breathing slowly into a paper back can help, although I don’t know if this is an “old wives tale” or not), and if whatever that is does or does not stop the muscle jumps, then you will have addition “evidence”, as it were, for your doctor. But it strikes me that if these muscle problems are not constant, there might be some type of trigger, and if you could figure that out, you might be able to get better help eliminating them.
Bobbi
OH! I forgot about that! I was reminded the other day (I work nites) as I was falling asleep, and all of a sudden, I jerked awake, like that feeling you get when you are dreaming you are falling! Bill used to hate that, I did it several times a nite before I was diagnosed. OH! I hate that feeling! Then, I would be sitting watching T.V., and my leg would jerk so hard, I’d slam my shin into the coffee table, or it would be my arm jerking so hard I’d spill my pop or drop the cig. Forgot all about that. I never told the doc, the only thing I can think is it’s the thyroid affecting the muscle groups.
Pat
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