Calling AT Doc's: Is this something that is diagnosable?

[destrekor]

Quite a few issues involved, but let's start with the present symptoms:
(and be prepared for a lengthy post)

-neck and back, for the past 2.5 months, have been bothering me but varied in discomfort level: at different times, or with different pain meds in me, it can be some combination of a feeling of cramping muscles around the spine, generally stiff, or just a general discomfort that is hard to describe. My neck is most often either just a general discomfort, and one that I cannot explain for the life of me, or is actually kind of paining me. Regardless, the combination of my neck and back (mostly middle back) seems to be causing issues with my pushups, which is something I have no choice but to do but these issues have never existed before.

-mental clarity seems to be... off. Either it's just my ability to focus, or possibly my ability to recall memories. I'm likely able to be diagnosed ADD and this has been true for a few years now (but really wasn't in my childhood which is strange), but it seems to be even worse this quarter of school. Either I'm just growing more careless (which would be very strange given some circumstances, like bad grades taking away the Army scholarship paying for school for the next quarter), or something is different. But my procrastination level has jumped insanely this quarter. And my focus on things at the last minute used to be great, but even now, after procrastinating, I still maintain terrible focus.
It just feels like my sub-conscious wants me to give up on everything, but consciously I want to excel yet the sub-conscious is determined to win. Ugh.

Now, I don't know whether the rest can be connected to anything, but it might be medically significant considering this was around the time I seriously began to start changing my focusing ability, and had some changes in my life.

This will be like a little story, that details the event, and the changes.

Junior year of highschool, I'm in the last half of the year, and in a computer networking (CCNA) career program (takes up half the school day, for both semesters, and completion of the program is two years, so a serious chunk of education). I'm dead-set on going into the computer field for a career, and at this point am considering going into computer engineering for college, but haven't been putting a lot of thought into that, that happens more in the summer between junior and senior year. But I digress.

I get hit with a nasty flu-like virus. Got the fever, got the general malaise. But then, I also have an extremely pained and stiff neck. Moving it hurts like hell, and just increases the pain in my head. I'm not nauseous at all, but I'm basically just knocked out. I mean, the fever goes down in a day or two, but the pain in my head and neck is just intense, so much so that I have no desire and/or capability to process complex thought. That computer class? It's not happening, so I just put my head down all day, and in my other classes too. Work at the restaurant that week? Oh it was rough. And to make matters more strange? The fever is gone, but after work I notice my temperature is now BELOW my normal temp, something I've never had in my life. Normal temp is 97.7ish. I had a 96.5 or so. And no, I didn't have any fluids for a good while prior to recording the temp. I hydrated well during work, but I had moments of chills and warmth just like a fever, and my mind was still doing the "don't bother me with any mental work" thing.
After the first week, the flu-like symptoms completely disappear, temperature returns to normal. But my head, it's basically a constant headache, and the neck is still somewhat stiff too. I mean, the headache never disappears, and for the second week its still very bad. And... the headache actually stays with me for like 4 more weeks, each week being less worse than the previous, until about the 6th week into the entire 'illness' it's at the point where it's just nagging me, but otherwise has no real effect on mental ability. Basically, it's there but I really only know it when I give thought to it, otherwise its just sitting there in the background, annoying me. Eventually, probably about week 7, it's gone, or at least to my ability to recognize it. Whatever was giving me the pains, whatever the cause, who knows when that disappeared, could have been a few more weeks after that point.
During that time, I think around weeks 2, 3, and 4, I took a couple trips to the doctor, and ended up having a head/neck X-ray (checking for pinched nerves in neck and condition of my sinuses), as well as a CT scan. After both showed nothing, we were going to move on to an MRI but at that point the symptoms were getting to the point where it wasn't bothering me enough, and the costs for all the testing was killing insurance and how much my parents had to pay out of pocket, so due to the fact that the symptoms were slowly disappearing, we basically just stopped pursuing medical attention. Also, I think I had like 5 vials of blood drawn to have tests run, and nothing appeared there either.
So, doctors were stumped, and so were we.
Now, after this is long-gone, in the summer I'm looking at colleges. Still pursuing computer engineering or computer software. But... somewhere in there I just stopped caring. About a month into my senior year, and still in the CCNA program, I just stop caring about it. My competitions were weak (compared to junior year where I went to nationals, placed somewhere around 15th, after a 1st local and 4th or 5th at states in computer tech/troubleshooting), and performance in class was dropping. Focus on material dropped too, and just started to no longer care to pursue a computer career.
And I switched focus in regards to joining the military. First it was just looking into joining the Army, then I started focusing on ROTC, looking both to Air Force and Army but eventually just started focusing solely on Army ROTC (which is what I did).

So, not sure if the medical issues caused my change in interests or not, that could have just been the course I was headed on and maybe I would have made those changes in interest regardless of that little medical episode. No clue.

But there it is. Can any of this all be linked together? Did my brain go through some kind of change due to that episode?
Is what I'm experiencing right now any kind of medical thing, or just something I need to visit a chiropractic center for to get some kinks worked out of my neck and back?

Thanks

 

[StageLeft]

Cliffs

 

[destrekor]

Originally posted by: Skoorb
Cliffs

Don't think that's gonna happen.

But here's an attempt:

currently:
neck and back stiffness/discomfort for past 2.5 months
mental processing might be a little worse than normal, attention span is dropping

few years ago:
had a 2 month long headache following a bout of flu-like symptoms with a terribly painful stiff neck. potentially meningitis/encephalitis but was never diagnosed, even following x-rays and CT scans (MRI could have done the trick but we bailed at that point). I feel I may have changed interests and subtle personality traits due to changes in the brain from that illness, but am not entirely convinced that is the case.

help figure out what is currently wrong, and if what I had a few years ago is connected to anything. or if I'm just a big hypochondriac.

 

[purbeast0]

have you ever had an MRI? the pains you describe sound SOMEWHAT similar to the back pains I was having, however I could pinpoint when my back first started hurting and it was due to squatting incorrectly and hurting myself. my issues were 2 messed up discs in my lower lumbar.

now i know there are also discs in the neck. that is why i was asking if you had an MRI before to check the discs in your neck.

also in reference to your other symptoms ...

a few years ago I was holding my wife (girlfriend at the time) on my neck in a pool and we were chicken fighting another couple. well my wife leaned forward a little too much and really REALLY hurt something in my neck. this sucked cause it was at the beach and we had 2 days left there ...

for those next 2 days man i was in pain. while my neck was aching like all hell, it also gave me flu like symptoms - i had major headaches, felt nausious, didn't want to do anything, etc. i never vomitted or took my temperature so i can't say whether or not I had a fever. but the symptoms that you described, i also had those due to neck pains. i couldn't even lie down w/out feeling like crap and had trouble sleeping because i felt so bad.

i'm not saying you have disc issues in your neck for sure, but unless you can rule that out, it seems like that could be a potential issue you have and from personal experience, neck issues can give you the other type of symptoms you are feeling.

also on the note of hypocondriac ... last spring i started having issues in my chest, this weird "spasm" so to say. well it kind of freaked me out and i went to the docs and they coudln't find anything. and then since they couldn't find anything it started to freak me out more, but eventually the spasms went away on their own. however, since that time, i started to also "pay more attention" to what my body is doing, and I thought I started noticing other stuff that wasn't normal. however it was just me realizing stuff that my body does normally that i used to just ignore before this scare came on.

also the docs think it may have had to do w/anxiety since i had quite a few things going on in my life. My brother was getting married in 2 months, my mom remarried in 3 months, and me in 5 months from when this initially happened. they thought it may have been a mixture of anxiety and stress, however i did not FEEL stressed at all. oh yea, and to top all of this chest pain off, a few months later i started seeing blood in my poop when i wiped which didn't make things better, but thats for another day

well it turns out some people who are stressed just don't show it and it kind of pents up inside and you don't let it out. and since you aren't letting it out it can make your body do weird things or cause anxiety type feelings. i was never diagnosed 100% w/stress or anxiety issues at all, but i can tell you after my wedding and stuff since then i have felt much more relaxed.

sorry if my post is all over the place but it was kind of hard for me to pinpoint one thing and tell you only about that

 

[eddiebravo]

meningitis was the first thing that came to mind after reading your post. but you said you had blood tests done that didnt show any infection, so that cant be it. you had ct scans done so if there was something caused increased intracranial pressure, i would guess the doctors would have seen it. you have no symptoms now other than feeling like you dont want to do what you were once interested in doing?

 

[destrekor]

Originally posted by: eddiebravo
meningitis was the first thing that came to mind after reading your post. but you said you had blood tests done that didnt show any infection, so that cant be it. you had ct scans done so if there was something caused increased intracranial pressure, i would guess the doctors would have seen it. you have no symptoms now other than feeling like you dont want to do what you were once interested in doing?

Well what I hadn't covered in my original post, I'm now in the middle of my junior year in college, so that was, wow, about 4 years ago that I had the general symptoms of meningitis.

However, viral meningitis, the way to tell through medical proof is not blood tests, but a spinal tap. So blood tests really would just rule out basically every other bacterial/viral cause for such a condition. I guess the typical process for determining something like meningitis/encephalitis is to do a CT scan to make sure there is no extreme intra-cranial swelling, and if safe, to move on to a spinal tap. Maybe too severe of swelling would be enough to call it such, or maybe too much swelling would cause complications in a spinal tap, so not sure.
But basically my CT scan didn't show anything, so the next step was an MRI but we stopped pursuing a diagnosis because I was recovering, and the costs were racking up so I didn't push it for something that didn't seem to be life threatening since I was, of course, recovering. The MRI, if it was any real medical condition, would have definitely showed something in the scan, as I guess encephalitis for sure (not positive about meningitis) shows itself in an MRI. But regardless, after the MRI my guess would have been to do a spinal tap.
And some of my family members recently suggested it was mono, but I cannot see how that was possible. Flu-like symptoms and a stiff neck tend to mean meningitis/encephalitis (though more rare than viral meningitis). I think half the reason my family doesn't want to believe it was viral meningitis is because everyone hears meningitis and links it to the rare and very deadly bacterial meningitis. Viral meningitis is not exactly rare and can be caused by a host of viruses, and is rarely life threatening for a healthy adult, just like a severe flu with longer lasting symptoms as far as I can tell.

Either way, no, I have no other lasting symptoms from that episode. And like I said, some neurological changes might have happened afterward, at least now with hindsight it seems easiest to link some of my 'changes' to that time, but I'm not really sure.

I've not heard too much about meningitis causing changes in the neurological component of the brain. I have heard of something called PANDAS, which is where the virus that causes strep throat can cause further changes in the patient, chief of which is a new tics/OCD behavior.
I have a somewhat mild case of ADD, and tied with that some OCD symptoms, but I don't really have any noticeable tics. I could say that some things I do are more grounded in an OCD/tic-like category, but that's if I really carefully try and pay attention to the things I do, as nothing is obvious to an outsider. I'm mostly just kind a person that has patterns, I tend to do things with a common flow but nothing that's really particular... I guess that's how I can best word it. Not sure...

 

[eddiebravo]

id say junior year in college is a pretty common time to undergo some big personal changes. if you have no symptoms now and the ct scan cleared you, i wouldnt worry about it. if you are some kind of freak, you might get the spinal tap just for fun and to say you had one, but if i were you i would probably just forget it and go on living life normally.

 

[destrekor]

Originally posted by: eddiebravo
id say junior year in college is a pretty common time to undergo some big personal changes. if you have no symptoms now and the ct scan cleared you, i wouldnt worry about it. if you are some kind of freak, you might get the spinal tap just for fun and to say you had one, but if i were you i would probably just forget it and go on living life normally.

Well do remember that was actually junior year in highschool I had that. I'm a junior in college now.
But yeah, that's why I'm not quick to blame anything period. Highschool and college are times you are changing a lot.

My biggest thing right now:
what the hell is wrong with my neck/back, and if anything stated thus far is connected to a seemingly more pronounced drop in attention span/memory recall.
I'm thinking of going to a chiropractic center soon to see if I can get any kinks worked out, but not sure about cost as I doubt insurance will cover it.