I'm new here and will introduce myself a little later but what led me to find this place today is questions about my husband...
He has been previously diagnosed with PTSD, with Major Depressive Disorder with mixed emotional features (whatever that means), and I'm sure bipolar was on the list at one point.
The nightmares and flashbacks have decrease greatly in the 9 yrs I've known him, the depression still flares up...but the symptom that we need to understand and find a way to control is total body numbness.
What he experiences is not a pins and needles type of thing, but a loss of tactile sensation - he can't feel what he is touching/holding or things that touch him...
First occurance was about 6 yrs ago after he got a cracked mercury filing replaced - we went to a specialist because of the mercury released during the removal, the procedure involved some big dental damn, and suction hoses and a rather impatient/ramy dentist - my husband definately experienced a trauma response back to childhood sex abuse while in the chair...but when he started to go numb that night our focus was all on the possibility of mercury poisoning.
Since then he had about 4 full blown reocurances (lasting 2 to 4 wks) of the numbness/loss of sensation in the next 5 yrs and now twice in the last 6 months. He would also have moments where he would feel the degree of sensation fade for an hour or so and then pass. He tends to get really disoriented while it is happening - he is always hypervigalent, and having one sense off just makes the others work even harder, and being anywhere with a lot of stimuli starts to overwhelm him - then he starts to wonder if he can trust his other senses, like if he is talking on the phone but can't feel the phone, is he really having that conversation...needless to say, it pretty well incapsitates him becasue he works construction and can't physically handle the materials/power tools safely and mentaly feels like crap.
We have never found anyone that could explain what is going on, and getting sent home from the ER with an explanation of - well the nerologist has never heard of full body loss of senstation and it has always come back before so just go home and wait cause it must all be in your head - is a little frustrating.
We both acknowledge it could be some kind of dissotiative response but we have never found any references to it elsewhere, don't know how to help him manage the response, don't know why it would have started manifesting itself in this way for the last 6 years when this never occured during the previous 10 years of therapy/recovery or the 17 years before that when he was still trapped in an abusive home...
Anyone ever expereince this before?
He has been previously diagnosed with PTSD, with Major Depressive Disorder with mixed emotional features (whatever that means), and I'm sure bipolar was on the list at one point.
The nightmares and flashbacks have decrease greatly in the 9 yrs I've known him, the depression still flares up...but the symptom that we need to understand and find a way to control is total body numbness.
What he experiences is not a pins and needles type of thing, but a loss of tactile sensation - he can't feel what he is touching/holding or things that touch him...
First occurance was about 6 yrs ago after he got a cracked mercury filing replaced - we went to a specialist because of the mercury released during the removal, the procedure involved some big dental damn, and suction hoses and a rather impatient/ramy dentist - my husband definately experienced a trauma response back to childhood sex abuse while in the chair...but when he started to go numb that night our focus was all on the possibility of mercury poisoning.
Since then he had about 4 full blown reocurances (lasting 2 to 4 wks) of the numbness/loss of sensation in the next 5 yrs and now twice in the last 6 months. He would also have moments where he would feel the degree of sensation fade for an hour or so and then pass. He tends to get really disoriented while it is happening - he is always hypervigalent, and having one sense off just makes the others work even harder, and being anywhere with a lot of stimuli starts to overwhelm him - then he starts to wonder if he can trust his other senses, like if he is talking on the phone but can't feel the phone, is he really having that conversation...needless to say, it pretty well incapsitates him becasue he works construction and can't physically handle the materials/power tools safely and mentaly feels like crap.
We have never found anyone that could explain what is going on, and getting sent home from the ER with an explanation of - well the nerologist has never heard of full body loss of senstation and it has always come back before so just go home and wait cause it must all be in your head - is a little frustrating.
We both acknowledge it could be some kind of dissotiative response but we have never found any references to it elsewhere, don't know how to help him manage the response, don't know why it would have started manifesting itself in this way for the last 6 years when this never occured during the previous 10 years of therapy/recovery or the 17 years before that when he was still trapped in an abusive home...
Anyone ever expereince this before?