Hello. My name is Aaron, I'm 26, and I've had a serious problem for the past three weeks. Around December 16th, over the course of 3 days, I developed an issue where my body is showing no natural impulse to inhale after I exhale. It started out as a sleep disturbance (waking up repeatedly in the middle of the night taking in a huge gulp of air, having my heart racing, and having a tingling in my chest and arms, like I had stopped breathing in my sleep), and during the daytime as a shortness-of-breath. By day 3 I was completely inhaling manually, and I couldn't get to sleep for 2 days without immediately being woken up due to not breathing. I currently have to focus on my breathing in order to force myself to inhale for each breath I take. I went to the emergency room and they gave me a sleep aid and an anti-anxiety med, thinking I was experiencing panic attacks at night (because I mentioned waking up with an increased heart rate, they assumed it was a nocturnal panic attack). I didn't take either drug, because one was a CNS depressant, and I didn't want my respiration to get depressed even more, fearing that I might stop breathing for TOO long when I sleep. The other one was known to interact poorly with St. John's wort, another drug I'm taking.
I went to the chest doctor in the hospital a week later, and him and the head of the clinic said that they've never heard of this happening to someone who hasn't had a stroke or a brain tumor, or who wasn't obese. One of them just said "I think it will probably just go away." I also had my blood drawn friday and had every test run on it, and had an chest X-ray done, and neither of these things showed any abnormalities. The chest doctors supported my decision to not take those two drugs, as well, saying that this was a problem STAYING asleep, not a problem falling asleep, as well as a respiratory problem at it's core, and they discontinued my prescription to them.
I have gotten about 21 hours of sleep in the past seven days. I can only get to sleep if I'm DEAD tired, and even then I only sleep for 2.5 - 3 hours. I find myself just lying down with my eyes closed and focusing on my breathing just to get some kind of rest. If I begin to fall asleep when I do this, my body will jerk me awake, or I'll just get woken up due to not breathing. Recently I have been able to fall asleep for about 20 minutes after about 1.5 hours of lying down. I often had headaches all day after a night of this, but these have reduced in intensity in the past few days.
In addition to this, now my heart rate seems to increase when I eat certain foods. Regular V8, bananas, avocados, and burritos so far make my heart jump up to 90 BPM. I also am experiencing muscular weakness (I can't clench my fist hard anymore, my legs start to shake if I bend them). I've also been experiencing a kind of dizziness (like you would if you were drunk: limbs running into doorways, dropping things, limbs sort of flailing farther than you intended them to). I've also been getting really forgetful, forgetting where I put things that I just set down a few seconds ago, searching all over for them to find them again.
So, as for what I did immediately preceding the onset of these symtoms on December 16th:
-I had chinese food 3 times in the week and a half preceding. All were from local vendors here in San Francisco (mom-and-pop shops). This was the first time I had chinese food here.
-I drank a bottle of liquor one night, then two bottles of wine the next day. This was the weekend where symptoms began to show up. I have not consumed any alcohol since then.
-I had been microwaving hotdogs and meatballs on a plastic plate that had increasingly begun to flake off parts of it's surface and probably melted into my food sometimes, and I likely consumed some of this plastic. I ceased doing this during the weekend when these symptoms started manifesting.
The hospital is pretty much done with me. The advice nurse over the phone and the ER seem to just want me to stop coming in, as they apparently cannot determine a cause. At this point I'm just googling my symptoms and trying to find a cause and a treatment, eating as healthy as I can, running and exercising daily, drinking bottled water instead of tap water (incase our water is toxic somehow), and trying to stay optimistic.
Any help, suggestions, or theories anyone can give will be appreciated, because this is probably the last place I'll find that can help me.
-Aaron