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Thanks, these are such helpful articles!!!! As someone who had lifelong situational anxiety (usually social or performance-related) and then developed POTS, I can easily tell the difference between psychiatric anxiety and POTS-anxiety. POTS-anxiety is so much more physical -- it's like all the symptoms start happening for no reason. When I used to have social anxiety (and still do, on rare occasions), it was like the mental side of things ("oh no, they're all looking at me, everyone thinks I'm so stupid," etc) was more prominent, and the physical side-effects (racing heart, chest pain) felt like just that - side effects. Side effects of my cognitive process. Whereas POTS "anxiety" feels like a rush of physical symptoms that have cognitive side-effects -- I'll get the racing heart, start sweating, feel faint, can't breathe all out of no where, and I'll start thinking, "Ohmygod, I hope I don't have a panic attack in public, I hope there's nothing really wrong with me," etc. But, I think since doctors are so concerned with the physical, they can't see the difference -- they look at the physical attributes and just call it all "anxiety."

I agree, ginger tablets do nothing. The anti-motion-sickness property of ginger has something to do with the soft palate, so you have to actually taste the ginger for it to help. However, when you get it in the right form, it really does help a lot! I have horrible, horrible motion sickness and I've found that crystalized ginger works pretty well, and so does pickled ginger (the kind you get at Asian grocery stores), but the thing I've found helps the most is ginger altoids. They're very, very strong, and they're easy to carry around, so you can have them on hand whenever you need them. The only thing is they're sometimes hard to find. In the US you can get them at target; you can also order them on-line. I also take a lot of dramamine and bonine, and these help, too, but they do make me sleepy sometimes.

I took 450 mg of root extract (95% curcuminoids) and 50 g of turmeric root twice. Both times it gave me such a horrible stomach ache that I couldn't continue taking it. I didn't notice a change, but I only took it for two days. However, the second time I took it, I had a stomach ache for a whole week. This could easily have been a coincidence, but it was an "unusual" stomach ache that I've never had before except when taking turmeric. I hope it's working better for others!!!!!

Does anyone know what percentage of the general population has dysautonomia?

Is it too late to add "no diagnosis" to the first question? I want to vote but it won't let me leave the first question blank. I've had sleep problems since adolescence, but I think I also could have had some ANS stuff starting in adolescence, although it didn't get debilitating until early adulthood. I find when my POTS symptoms are worse my sleep problems are worse. I have stunningly vivid dreams now. I've always had dreams I could remember, but nothing like this. For the past three years or so, it's honestly like going to the movies every single time I fall asleep. For the past two years, since my dysaut has been it's worse, I seem to have no trouble falling asleep, but then I almost always wake up and can't sleep again from about 2 am to about 5:30 am -- then I can sleep again. I tend to assume this is some kind of weird circadian thing, but I've never been tested for anything. When I started taking vitamin D, I started sleeping better, but then after about a week or so I started having the same problem again. I never, ever, ever sleep more than 3 or at the very very most 4 hours at a time without waking up. Usually I wake up every 2-3 hours like clockwork. I can actually count on one hand the number of times I've slept an entire 6-hour night without waking up, because the few times it's happened it's been so startling I actually notice it. I don't think I've slept 8 hours straight since I was a child. To be honest, though, I sort of thought this was somewhat normal until I started living with my boyfriend -- and I noticed he doesn't get up in the night AT ALL. I thought maybe it was a guy thing, to be able to sleep like that. I mentioned it, jokingly, to some of my friends... who all seemed really surprised that I don't sleep through the night. When I started asking around, I realized there are way more people out there who sleep through the night most of the time than there are people like me. It seems like lots of people have the occasional night where they toss and turn, but very very very few have nights like that all the time. I was shocked, and I have talked to my doctor about it, but I've had so many tests in the past year we just sort of decided not to do much about it just yet.....

No, I didn't mean that people wouldn't choose certain treatments over another. I meant that no doctor would say "You know, I think this cancer is all in your head and you should meditate." Doctors should - and for more understood illnesses, do - present both mind and body solutions to illnesses. Like how doctors usually suggest both medication AND therapy for depression, even though some people choose to do one or the other.

I'm so sorry you're feeling so badly!!! I have crippling exhaustion as well, but in my case, it's just another fun symptom of POTS. I usually have about one day a week where I pretty much sleep all 24 hours, and then other days I sleep between 9 and 10 hours, sometimes with a nap in the afternoon. Like you, today I had to spend the whole day in bed, because I had a really busy weekend and I was completely wiped out. I was also sad to miss out on such a sunny day!!! I discussed CFS with my doctor, and it does often go hand-in-hand with POTS. In my case, I don't have any of the symptoms of CFS except for the fatigue -- CFS is actually much more than "just" chronic fatigue. There's an on-line quiz you can take that might help you determine if you have some of the other symptoms or not: http://www.cfids.org/about-cfids/do-i-have-cfids.asp I also found that I often have other problems going on that contribute to my fatigue. Periodically I have various vitamin deficiencies, for example, and this can make me REALLY tired. Sometimes my hypothyroid disease isn't well controlled. If fatigue is a big problem for you and you and your doctor decide you DON'T have CFS, I'd recommend getting routine blood work (vitamins, thyroid levels, complete blood count) at least twice a year to make sure you're not dealing with a treatable deficiency on top of POTS. I find that things can change fairly quickly for me -- for example, I had my vitamin levels checked in november, and they were all fine, and then when I got tested again in march, they were way off. So now I get tested more frequently and adjust vitamins and medication as necessary.

I think medicine doesn't understand the mind-body connection well enough yet to actually be able to determine what causes what. There's definitely some kind of connection, but it's so poorly understood. For example, doctors used to believe that cancer was caused by holding in anger. Now we believe cancer is caused by cell mutation and we have drugs to treat it. But, they've also discovered that people who meditate have a greater chance of fully recovering from cancer.... so what's going on there?? Even though it's universally accepted that cancer is a biologically-based physical illness, it seems the mind can somehow impact it. It used to be generally believed that depression was entirely "in the head" - that it was the mind that was unwell or unbalanced. Now we know the depressed mind has actual chemical problems, and that depression is a biologically-based physical illness as well -- and that it can cause other physical symptoms, like digestion problems and chronic pain. There are medications for it, but some people recover from this (biological, physical) illness just through non-medical interventions like talk therapy. Clearly, both the mind and the body are at work here, and we don't understand it very well. I'm sure there IS some kind of mind connection to POTS, the same way there's probably some kind of mind connection for all illnesses. The problem I have is that even though meditation has been shown to help cancer patients, no one in their right mind would tell someone with cancer to ONLY meditate, and forgo chemotherapy and radiation. Instead they take the medication they need AND try meditation. Same thing with depression - doctors don't tell patients to ONLY take medication, or to ONLY do therapy. They encourage people to try both and find what works. Doctors telling POTS patients to use ONLY mental/mind solutions is like telling someone with cancer to just meditate. It's fine if we acknowledge that there's some kind of mind/body connection we don't fully understand. But in treating illnesses, we have to go with what we know works, and more often than not what we know more about are the concrete medications that treat the body, not the mind. There are medications that help POTS, and there are physical lifestyle changes that help, too. Those things should be the first line of attack. If someone also finds therapy, meditation, or other "mind" solutions helpful to their symptoms, great. But they shouldn't be presented as the ONLY solution any more than they should be for other illnesses.

I also feel bad when my hr is normal, and it was worse when I was on beta blockers. The strange thing about BB's for me was they would dramatically change my HR (my "tachycardias" were sometimes only 85-90 on BBs) but they didn't change the other postural sensations. I often had uncomfortable, pre-syncope sensations when I was standing even if my hr was only 85. The difference was I could remain standing -- feeling uncomfortable, and feeling like I needed to sit down, but since my hr didn't continue going up and up and up, I didn't actually HAVE to sit down.

Thanks, all of you!!!! These responses really helped me a LOT. I had a chest x-ray, too, and sure enough, everything came back normal. My doctors' response was, "It must be something skeleto-muscular, don't worry about it." But I was never really worried it was something sinister (I've had it for years now), I was more hoping to find some relief. I've tried the treatments for costochondritis and they didn't help, but I'm thinking I might start looking into alternative medicine techniques, when I have a little extra cash. Mostly I just feel better knowing a lot of you have these problems too, because then I feel more comfortable saying it's probably just something related to POTS/ANS dysfunction. For me, this pain started very specifically after a virus, and came on several years AFTER my POTS developed -- so part of me thought it probably wasn't related. But now I'm figuring it is. I think you guys are right, I think because it's painful, I tend to take little breaths, and then I have to stop and "catch up" with a few deep breaths. And then too much deep-breathing makes my ANS go wacky. Strangely, I feel ok with having hit the end of the road in terms of figuring this out with my doctors. The pain bothers me, but I feel like now I can shift my focus from trying to diagnose it and solve it to trying to live with it and manage it. Thanks again!

I would STRONGLY recommend that you risk looking like a hypochondriac and pursue this to its end, whether with your PCP or with Miney and Meany, or with all three. And I would recommend not waiting until May either, if you think you can see your PCP sooner. As I know I've mentioned here, I wrestle a lot with the whole "but they'll think I'm blowing things out of proportion" debate. I hemmed and hawed for MONTHS with trying to figure out what was causing wacky insulin levels - was it thyroid? was it my diet? was it POTS? etc. My doctor kept saying, Well, why don't you try this, and if it doesn't work, come back in a few months. Finally I got up the courage to ask for every test under the sun and it turns out the whole problem was a simple vitamin deficiency. I could have been feeling better sooner if I had been less afraid of looking like a hypochondriac. And you know what? When I finally put my foot down and asked for a bunch of tests, my usually-judgmental PCP didn't judge me at all. Especially when they came back "off." Similarly, I've been doing the specialist-merry-go-round to try and get to the bottom of my chest/lung pain. I asked for every test, got it, and it all came back inconclusive and essentially I'm no closer to figuring out what's wrong than I was a few months ago. But I'm STILL glad I went through the trouble of all those tests, because now I've ruled out a lot of things, and it's easier for me to just accept that this is "something fluky" but not serious. You might get lots of tests and determine that your body is just different from the norm and there isn't an explanation for your abnormal labs and the GFR isn't calculated right for you -- but if this ends up being the case, at least you'll *know,* or if you don't know for certain you'll at least know it's the most logical conclusion, whereas now you don't know which conclusion makes the most sense. Oh, and also, even when all my pulmonary tests came back normal, my doctors STILL didn't think I was a hypochondriac. Or at least, they didn't tell me so to my face, and if they maybe suggested I am "too sensitive" to pain or something, I can say to myself "Well, they don't know what this feels like every day, and if they did they'd feel like jerks for implying it's all in my head." You can't let doctors' lack of empathy affect whether or not you get the care you need. Or at least, you have to try your hardest not to. Doctor's appointments are a big pain, and it's a big pain when you go through the trouble and the expense and they don't tell you anything for certain, but it's also a big pain to sit around not really knowing what's wrong and worrying it might be something serious you should be treating, or worrying the treatment you're taking isn't necessary. With more information - more tests, etc - you'll at least have something to help make all this murkiness a little clearer. Plus, it's kind of unreasonable for them to assume you're going to accept their diagnosis without testing. If they think you have something and there's a test for it out there, even if it's an imperfect test, they should be offering it to you. It's definitely not unreasonable as the patient to expect that. Maybe these are tests your PCP can order, and then once you have the results you'll have a better sense of whom to consult and work with? Also, in my case with the vitamin deficiency, I had a test in November that came back normal -- turns out it was a "low normal" but I didn't know that at the time. When I asked for more testing to try and get to the bottom of my insulin problems and even-more-extreme-than-usual fatigue, my PCP originally said "Well, but I just tested you for that and it was fine." Somehow I convinced her to run the test, and now, only five months later, it was way off. The "low normal" turned out to be a "on the way down to abnormal," we just didn't know it without the second test. If it's been a few months since you had certain tests, don't be afraid to ask for them again -- a "low normal" could have been your body on it's way to abnormal, instead of a constant level, you know? Anyway, good luck, and pound away at those "they'll-think-I'm-a-hypochrondriac" fears! You know something doesn't feel right, and if it takes a long time to figure out why, so be it. It doesn't make you a hypochondriac, it just makes you complicated. Which we all are around here, so don't feel bad about it!

I had vague symptoms all my life, with a marked increase in symptoms when I developed anorexia -- but, I had an eating disorder at the same time I started growing tall/going through puberty, so I don't know if the physical trauma of the eating disorder triggered the increase in symptoms, or if it was something that would have inevitably come with adolescence (since a lot of people experience onset during adolescence). Since the noticeable increase, my symptoms got slowly but steadily worse over time, even after I recovered from anorexia and stopped growing. Then for about the past year they've seemed to taper off and stay the same -- but that could be because in the last year I started medication and serious life-style changes. I like to think maybe someday my symptoms will improve, but practically speaking they've been bothersome for well over a decade now, and serious enough to interfere with my life for over five years now with no real improvement. So I'll feel pretty lucky if I just don't get worse!

Valliali, maybe it's because this is what people experience more or less on a daily basis -- I'm sure more people experience occasional panic attacks, but (thankfully!) it seems like not too many experience them daily or almost daily. You know, it's funny though, because I do think here we all tend to talk more about the abnormal symptoms we experience. We don't end up asking questions about the daily stuff because, well, we're used to it!! So it is kind of interesting to keep in mind that the symptoms that affect people the most aren't necessarily the ones that are the most talked about. It's too bad the percentages for the first two questions are all messed up. Later I might calculate some of them myself, because I'm interested, and if I do I'll share them here.

I know some of you here have had PFTs and I was wondering what your experiences were. I had a pulmonary function test because I have chronic chest pain, and it's specifically worse when I take a deep breath, or if I have to do something that requires a lot of breathing, like talking a lot or exercising. It's present every single day and it really bothers me because it's so uncomfortable. I also frequently feel like I'm having trouble catching my breath, and I often have to stop in my daily activities to sigh or take a few deep breaths. The "problem" is, I can breathe fine. It just hurts. I'm glad of this, but it's making getting help for it difficult, because my doctors keep checking my oxygen levels and saying, "Oh, it's fine." I CAN take deep breaths, it's just painful when I do. During the PFT, I felt very lightheaded and dizzy, and the pain was worse. After a few rounds of deep breaths/exhalations, I started to feel very fatigued and unwell, like I needed to lie down. After they gave me a nebulizer and did more deep-breathing, I felt EXTREMELY lightheaded, faint, and I started to tremble uncontrollably all over. My face got very flushed, which doesn't happen to me very often. I felt so unwell I was worried I wouldn't be able to drive home, and I had to lie down in my back seat for a while. The trembling and exhaustion continued for several hours. I think this reaction was caused at least in part by having to take so many deep breaths. The thing is, I'm pretty sure the test itself came out normal. The tech kept saying my results looked really good. Which brings me back to this problem of, I CAN breathe well enough, but breathing deeply seems to set off all these reactions in me that I kind of feel like shouldn't happen if everything is, indeed, normal. Does anyone have any insights? Why might be happening to my ANS when I breathe deeply that could cause these negative sensations? If my lungs themselves are fine, what ANS reaction might be causing me to feel like I can't catch my breath? And for those of you who have had the PFT, did the nebulizer make you feel really sick, too???

Yes, this happens to me too, with some regularity. I can hear my pulse "whooshing" in my ear when I go up a flight of stairs, or if I am really pushing myself a little too hard with exercise and then stop. I always have assumed this is caused by high blood pressure or high heart rate, since it only happens when my heart is pounding. I don't know if it's dangerous or not, but maybe if your 15 minutes of jog/brisk walk didn't feel good you should start slower. When I got back into exercise after POTS I started with 15 minutes of slow walking, and honestly even now I can walk along at a decent pace for about three miles sometimes, but I would never be able to jog and recover from it afterward. Maybe you need to rethink what counts as "exercise" - you want to be pushing your body a little bit, but not so much that it's hard to recover from it.

I'm sure there's probably already a poll like this out there but I searched and couldn't find one. So many of us have so many different symptoms I was just curious to see what the most prevalent are. I know there are a lot that sound like they over lap (like postural tachycardia vs. orthostatic heart rate) but I know some people have a high standing heart-rate AND a high resting hr, and some just see a big change, so I was curious about the details. Similarly, I know some have hypotension when they stand up only, and some have hypotension all the time that just gets WORSE when they stand. I wanted to see the breakdown - hope it's not too confusing! Also, sorry a lot of symptoms aren't included - they only allowed me 40 choices.

This was so hard for me to answer, because it varies so much!!!!! I would say that most weeks I am able to do SOMETHING active most days (never every day, though). Sometimes that's a slow, short walk. Sometimes it's 30 minutes of moderate aerobics. I can never do really heavy things, like running or fast aerobics or anything, but on really good days I can do things that healthy people would consider exercise. The thing is, I was an athlete before I got POTS, and I've been working up to being able to exercise this much for about three years. At first I could barely go for a fifteen minute slow walk on a GOOD day. Now, when I exercise, my heart ALWAYS beats really fast and hard -- it's hard for me to keep it at 60%-80% of my maximum heart rate, which is what is recommended. I do make sure I keep it below my maximum heart rate for my age (192). All exercise gets my heart rate up to about 120-140 at least, and usually anything moderate (brisk walk, etc) puts me over 140 very quickly. I can have my heart rate up to about 175 before I start to feel really uncomfortable. I used to feel really uncomfortable if it went over 125 or so. So I'm not sure my increased exercise tolerance, over the past three years, is necessarily about being less symptomatic, so much as being able to TOLERATE those symptoms better. Most healthy people don't reach 80% of their maximum heart rate taking a moderate walk, but I pretty much always do. And, as firewatcher pointed out, it takes a lot out of me. I would say most days after I exercise I feel like I need a nap, and I feel tired not in a good way. Sometimes it leaves me utterly exhausted. If I push myself too much -- if, say, I go for a too-strenuous up-hill hike -- I can be out for days. I keep it up because I do think exercising has helped me marginally; last year at this time, standing still for a minute or two AUTOMATICALLY made my heart rate go up to 130-140, no matter what. Now my standing hr is often 110, or 120 on a "bad day." I can only assume this change is from trying to get my heart in the best shape it can realistically be in. So, the exhaustion from exercise is worth it to me because I think it might make me feel a little better over-all. I definitely have some days/weeks when I can't do anything at all, not even walk to the mailbox for mail. But then I have some days where my exercise seems decidedly moderate.

Goodness, I could have written your first post myself! I am often very cold, and my hands and feet turn blue regularly. Sometimes I'll feel normal (like the rest of my body is a normal temperature) but my hands will be icy to the touch. Then all of a sudden they might get hot. I now have several pairs of fingerless gloves, and I take them off and put them on again all day long. It helps, though, to keep my hands from getting so painfully cold. I also get really cold right before I go to sleep, and pile on the blankets -- then I usually wake up in the night drenched in sweat. Then in the morning I wake up and I'm freezing again. My doctor was actually alarmed by the night-sweating thing, but so far we haven't figured anything out. The weird thing is I seem to sweat profusely from my chest, neck, and back when this happens, but from nowhere else -- my face, armpits, etc. don't sweat at all, even though when I exercise in the day I sweat all over like a normal person. In the morning, all my symptoms (esp. the tachycardia) are particularly bad. In fact, when I first started having problems, I ONLY had symptoms in the morning. Now they last all day, but they're much worse in the morning. I do have a dry cough - usually just one at a time - when my pressure pulse is up. Usually, my heart kind of feels like it's flopping around, and I'll have "skipped beats" and then a really strong, forceful beat or two after the skip. The forceful one causes me to cough.

Today is my fourth day of taking 2000 IU's of D and last night was the first night I got a good night's sleep in MONTHS. For several months I've been waking up about two hours after falling asleep and not falling asleep again until morning. I thought it was just bad luck, but then I read that d deficiency can cause insomnia. I'm hoping my good sleep last night wasn't just a coincidence and that the d is actually helping my insomnia. Yes, I have had my liver function tested and my kidneys, and they both are fine. I have gluten intolerance and I eat gluten-free, and vitamin malabsorption is a common side effect of gluten intolerance.... but also, I'm not eating fortified cereals any more because of the GF, so that could have caused the deficiency, and so could the fact that I live at a relatively high latitude. Also, remember how a while back I wrote about having inexplicable high blood glucose readings? Turns out that was caused by the D-deficiency, too! I'm so amazed that such an easy thing to fix was causing so many problems for me. This is the first "good" news health-wise I've had in years! For once I have a treatable condition!!! PS - Suzy, if you have elevated parathyroid, sitting in the sun probably isn't going to be enough to help you. If you don't feel comfortable taking the big dose monthly, maybe you should talk to your doctor about a different dose? Lots of people take 1000 - 2000 IU's daily (that seems to be fairly routine for over-the-counter) - and maybe that quantity, plus your sunbathing, would be good enough. But you should def. follow up on this if you're having parathyroid problems.

YES. In fact, I would say the flopping-heart sensation bothers me more than the tachycardia does. It's especially bad when I lay down -- it helps a little if I lie propped with my head up, but it still happens pretty much every time I lay down. I've had lots of monitor type things for this and my cardio assures me it's fine. Also, I've had this symptom for over five years now and nothing bad has happened to me yet, so that's reassuring as well. I did find my beta blocker helped this symptoms a LOT. I take metoprolol ER. If your doc has checked this out and says not to worry, I think in this case you really can not worry.

I read early in my POTS research that sometimes vitamin D problems come up with dysautonomia. I was tested a few months ago and it was normal, but then I got tested again recently and it's way waay low. In a way I'm relieved, because it explains some of my recent bad symptoms: extreme fatigue, chronic pain, did I mention extreme fatigue? I'm looking forward to starting a supplement regimen and hopefully feeling a little better soon. How many of you have had various vitamin problems, and/or what do you take for herbal supplements that help? I already take a b-complex, magnesium, and zinc, and I've found they've helped at least as much as my prescription medications.

I was talking with my sister recently, who is generally very supportive and understanding about my POTS and always seems to listen and "get it" for the most part. We were talking about malaria, and I was explaining to her that untreated malaria, if it isn't fatal, can result in lifelong malaise. And she said, "Wow, I can't imagine what that would be like, to just kind of feel a little sick every day, can you?" Um, YES, I can imagine it, because I DO feel a little sick every day!!!! I was so taken aback I didn't say anything. It made me realize that even though she really tries to be understanding she hasn't really fully taken in what my day-to-day life is like. And here I was thinking I was complaining too much to everyone, but it seems like they haven't even noticed!! I do feel grateful that she at least is generally supportive, and I feel grateful that my illness isn't worse than it is.... but little comments like this just feel soooooo invalidating, and I worry a lot if I respond to things like this honestly (like if I said, "Yes, I do in fact know what that's like") that people will think I'm being melodramatic or whiny or something. It's kind of like, if I've given them all this information, and they don't understand how sick I feel, then I better not keep reiterating it because they won't really believe me. Does that make any sense at all? Anyway, I just needed to share that with people who understand these things.

Oh I forgot one thing on this topic that I wanted to say: I've had SOME symptoms of dysautonomia since childhood, but I didn't have symptoms that interfered with my daily life until about four or five years ago when I was 22. As a child, I ALWAYS had polyuria and my parents used to get annoyed at how frequently I had to urinate -- but they also realized (from accompanying me in public bathrooms -- this has been happening since I was very small) that no matter how often I went I always had to pee a LOT in terms of volume. Then as a young adolescent (13 or 14) I started really having noticeable polydypsia, and started feeling "really sick" every single morning. My family just said I wasn't a morning person, which was an understatement! I also remember when I was 14 I went to the doctor for a physical, and they found that my heart rate was only 40 -- which is very bradycardic for someone under the age of 21. They all panicked and my doctor called another doctor in and they talked about what this could mean for a few mintues -- meanwhile I got up and walked around because they wanted to see if I was dizzy or off-balance -- then they took my pulse again and it was a normal 80. Sometimes I wonder if this incident was really an early POTS symptom.

I wasn't diagnosed until last year, but I had already been having significant symptoms for four years when I finally got diagnosed. Not totally debilitating, but enough to seriously interfere with work and school. I recently got a copy of my medical records, and for years I was going to the doctor once a month or more; in each entry, my doctor writes: "complains of excessive thirst, complains of orthostatic intolerance, complains of racing heart" but even though I kept coming back with the same complaints, they just ran an ECG once and told me nothing was wrong. I couldn't believe my doctor had actually written the words "orthostatic intolerance" and didn't make the connection that I had CHRONIC orthostatic intolerance!!! It was only when I got to a point where I was struggling to be able to work part-time (I had long ago given up on full-time work) that my doc finally started to take all my "complaints" seriously and sent me to a cardiologist who did a TTT. The crazy thing is, this woman is actually a GOOD doctor, generally speaking -- I have been really happy with the care she's provided for all my other medical concerns, and now that I'm diagnosed with POTS she's been great. I think it's still just a relatively rare and un-talked-about disorder, and she just never made the connection for all those symptoms.

I'm no doctor, but those glucose results don't sound normal to me. My understanding is that fasting glucose levels are supposed to be between 60 - 100, and that non-fasting levels should be under 140. !86 and 153 sound like a spike. It seems like you are having glucose spikes and crashes (70 is also low for just two hours after eating). Did your doc tell you this was normal? If it were me I would follow up on this and find out why, exactly, this is considered normal in your case (since I don't think it's usually considered normal).