Kirsty

Hi all. I was diagnosed with POTS in 2015 after a severe bout of Influenza A. On the same day, I found out I was pregnant, and have since had a baby. I was travelling along ok until baby was nine months old, then was hit with severe, anomalous symptoms such as blurred vision, dizziness, overwhelming fatigue (like chronic fatigue on steroids...a feeling like I've been anaesthetised), nausea, paraesthesia in hands and feet, tremulousness/anxiety/dread/shaking, and incapacitating depression/suicidality. The latter is very, very uncharacteristic of me, seemed to come out of the blue, and seemed to be far more catastrophic than what the situation would otherwise create. I spent a month in hospital earlier this year to no avail (trialling all the usual POTS medication which created uncomfortable side effects, yet did not help the symptoms for which I was taking them in the first place), and anti-depressants I've tried (three so far) have created such awful akathisia that I've had no choice but to stop them. I saw a different doctor recently who did some gut microbe testing and it found an overgrowth of streptococcus, for which he placed me on antibiotics. Within a day or two, I noticed an elevation in my mood, and within three-four days I experienced an 80% improvement in my depression/suicidality symptoms. It honestly felt like a miracle. Unfortunately, two weeks into a six week course of these antibiotics, they stopped working (we don't know why), and I am now back to catastrophic depression, also with no change to physical symptoms I am wondering what illness might be underlying the POTS....the more research I do, the more I find that POTS patients seem to have an underlying condition. I am convinced there is some sort of inflammatory/stealth viral or bacterial process at work for my depression to have responded to antibiotics. Any ideas?