Please help
Hi i’m 16 years old and for 5+ years I’ve been dealing with many different health issues that I have gotten no answer to. I’m going to start by telling all the events of my chronic pain in order, if anyone can make any correlations or diagnostic ideas it would be so helpful.
When I was younger possibly aged 11 or 12, I had a fall off a zipline to my head. I didn’t, for some reason, put my arms out. If I did, I would have been sure to break something because my bones are easily breakable. Because I didn’t use this reflex, my head hit the ground first. I don’t remember anything from this event besides waking up with my parents afterwards.
Immediately after, I had back pain that lasted 1-2 weeks and I did go to emergency but was brushed off. The back pain did go away and I’ve never dealt with it since.
Maybe one year later, I start to get episodes of nausea. At the time, I had no idea what it was because I was still young. The feeling was not as extreme as it is now. I remember being at school, having to sit out of PE because my head feels strange. It didn’t feel like a migraine, but it felt heavy and sensitive. I don’t remember much of it.
One year after that, it gets much worse. Every 2 months, I started to get a vertigo episode that lasted for 5 days at a time. At first, people didn’t believe me because I wasn’t sure how to describe what I felt. I would also have nystagmus.
Sometime after that, possibly a year, I receive an MRI for my head and nothing is wrong. They diagnose me with BPPV. Even as a child at thirteen or fourteen I knew this was bs because the epley manoeuvre doesn’t work on me and my symptoms are very different. I felt, and still feel, that they were trying to quickly diagnose me even if it were false because they were unsure of the real issue.
At fourteen, around the same time, I start to get shoulder and neck pain. The pain feels deep and travels down my arm to where it is difficult to use. The unusual thing I don’t understand is that the pain switches shoulders. For example, I could fall asleep with severe pain on the right side but wake up with pain now only on the left.
It was very painful and I would miss a lot of school over it. Again, I went to emergency many times but all they would do was an XRAY.
Here they diagnosed me with a humeral cyst and determined the pain was resulting from the cyst. To me, this never made any sense because the cyst is only on the left side, so how come i get pain on the right side too?
Fast forward to 16 (my current age). I still get shoulder and neck pain but it is on and off as it has always been. I will go through phases where I feel nothing, but it always comes back eventually.
I still get the vertigo, and it seems to have been getting worse every year. I now vomit for the first two days of the episode, and any light makes it much worse.
At this age, I was diagnosed with an EVA. If you don’t know what that is, it is an Enlarged Vestibular Aqueduct on one ear. I haven’t received much information about it from doctors, but again they blamed my vertigo on this new diagnosis. Its main symptom is hearing loss, which I apparently have in one ear.
Now the reason I mentioned the zipline incident is because it’s the only memory I have of a “traumatic event” that could have caused these incidents. Yes i’ve mentioned it to the doctors.
I’ve been prescribed many different medication for all issues I have but nothing has worked so far. Please, if anyone can make any suggestions what to do next or correlations between events please help.