TLDR:
After a bought of heat exhaustion and dehydration my autoimmune system went haywire. I took tofizopam 3 times a day for 3 months until my symptoms calmed down and then spent another 2 months weaning myself down to 1 pill every other day. I am doing a lot better, and for the most part functioning normally, but had a couple of episodes recently and wanted to ask for advice on what to do to help recovery from those with maybe more experience.
Longer version:
In June my video game addiction got the best of me and I end up going from a dehydrated tension headache into a hot bath into a hot room where I fell asleep exhausted from gaming. Usually I would have had the air conditioning on, but it wasn't. My wife woke me up 30 minutes later and I was hyper-ventilating, shaking terribly, and having trouble speaking, more our of shock than anything I think. We called an ambulance and I got sent to a hospital operating at night, that unfortunately told me next to nothing and that I should be fine now. I was pounding water waiting for the ambulance, and drank 3 sports drinks in the hospital lobby after they let me go until we called for a ride.
5 days later I woke up in the middle of the night hyper-ventilating and shaking. We called an ambulance and the same crew showed up. They warned us it would likely be a similar outcome, but we decided to go to the hospital anyway and ended up in a different hospital with a nerve specialist on call. He did a CT, but suggested I was experiencing dysautonomia, and more hyper-ventilating than anything. Explained what hyper-ventilating is/etc., and I felt much more equipped to go home and deal with things if they cropped up again. Up until that point we had been calling it a bout of heat exhaustion, but I think the heat exhaustion was more like the last straw on an already worn thin nervous system plagued by an addictive lifestyle than wasn't going to work for me anymore at 40 years old.
Over the next two weeks I started having random panic attacks, always at night, despite having never had a nervous nor anxious bone in my body, and ended up being given lorazepam to help with flare ups. I wasn't accepting to the idea that this was a mental problem, again because I've never been an anxious or nervous person, but the drugs given specifically to reduce anxiety were working, so I had to accept what I was being told. I was put on tofisopam for the next 5 months and have 85% recovered.
- For the first two weeks I had constantly "sharp" vision, like after a server migraine. I also had dizziness at some points initial for which I was given a weeks worth of inner ear medication.
- For the first roughly 6 weeks I stayed at my in-laws and avoided almost all cell-phone and television as they made me feel sick and tired.
- After that I started feeling better, went home, and I would spend 30 minutes on my computer (I'm a programmer) and two hours off. One hour on, one hour off, etc. I was only taking showers and never went outside in the heat without ice packs wrapped around the back of my neck. I meditated daily, had miso soup first thing in the morning, did vagus nerve massages, went to a acupuncturist every 2-4 weeks, and went to a chiropractor roughly 3 times a week.
- Currently I'm only taking breaks every two hours, and trying to uphold regular food and sleep schedules, as well as light exercise 3 days a week (30 minutes fast walking on a treadmill and some weight lifting)
A few days ago we went to Costco a couple days before New Years (the biggest holiday over here in Japan) and after walking around Costco, and having missed my tofisopam noon dose, it now being 6PM or so, and I also left my water bottle in the car, I started having trouble swallowing and panicking that I was going to choke on nothing. I popped a lorazepam and went back to rest in the car. Tonight I took a hot bath while looking at the Amazon New Years sales going on and think I stayed in a little too long despite drinking water throughout the day, prior to my bath, and during my bath, and started panicking a bit and ended up taking another lorazepam.
The New Years festivities were a week long, so it's understandable my body is tired from all of that, but it's still a bummer to slip backwards rather than the slow forward progression I'd been making for months.
It feels like I've been floating around ~85-90% "recovered" but still susceptible to "flares". I have stopped meditating, I'm not taking as many breaks, and I've not been upholding my in-bed at 9:30, no phone, lights out at 10:30 plan I had going on last year... I'm thinking of getting back into that routine tomorrow and am curious if other have any suggestions for things to be doing or not doing to help recovery.
Thank you.