Can anyone diagnose this please?

[soggymoggy]

Hi there.

This is not the sort of place I would normally come for help, but I'm getting a bit desperate. Over the past few months I've been having increasing neurological problems and I can't get any doctors to listen to me. Just a bit of background first; I'm female, 26 and otherwise very healthy.

It started not long before Christmas 2009, when I got a really bad headache one evening and went to bed. I passed out in the shower the following morning, barely knew where I was and one of my neighbours prevented me from getting into my car because she thought I was drunk. All I remember of the next few days is being very confused and very teary, but I know from my partner that I was having trouble finding words and keeping my balance, as well as having inappropriate emotional reactions like giggling when things weren't funny and crying at things that wouldn't normally bother me. He described it as being as if I'd dropped 100 IQ points. After a couple of days going backward and forward to GPs I was admitted to hospital, although by this time I was improving anyway. They ran blood tests (I had a totally inappropriate fear reaction to the needle and kicked the nurse in the head), as well as an MRI scan. When my partner asked what the scan showed, the answer was "nothing that would explain these symptoms", but they refused to show us the films. After another couple of days I was sent home, but my partner arranged for me to see a private neurologist. The difficulty was that by this stage I was a lot better, and it was impossible for me to explain anything to the neurologist because I simply didn't remember much. He said he wished the hospital had thought to do an EEG but that it was too late by now, and said he thought the most likely culprit was some sort of virus.

Anyway, I was pretty much back to normal after another couple of weeks. In the six months since then, however, I've been gradually losing the vision in my right eye - it's getting very blurry, and seems to be worse when I'm tired. Since the tennis season started I've also noticed I'm having real trouble tracking moving objects; I now often can't tell how far away the ball is until it bounces, and the effect is particularly pronounced if the ball is coming straight towards me - when this happens I couldn't tell you whether the ball is a foot from me or just crossing the net. My pupils are also very uneven, with the right one often a lot bigger than the left; I'm also having brief spells where there seems to be a fine white film over my vision. I've had my eyes checked by an optician, and he said that my prescription hasn't changed (I've been very slightly short-sighted for a few years), so I don't know how to explain this.

In the last couple of months I've started having sick headaches; they're not awful but they're persistent and tend to coincide with periods of vertigo, light-headedness and tinnitus. Literally the last couple of weeks I've started getting sudden, sharp stabbing pains in my fingertips. This affects both hands, lasts for a couple of minutes at a time and seems to be completely random; my partner - who is a physiotherapist - has checked my neck and found no cause there. I'm also struggling to sleep (speaking as someone who has always needed plenty of sleep, that is very strange) and I'm feeling quite depressed; I realise that these latter might well be a simple reaction to worrying and feeling ill though so I don't know if they're necessarily helpful.

I'm also having problems with my memory; I keep remembering things out of context. For example, I distinctly remember a woman at work telling me about a particular news story, but not only does she insist that she didn't know it but my partner says he told me about it the day before I started to retell it to him - as something a colleague had told me! At other times I can remember that something was said but can't remember who it was, or I might know who said something but not be able to remember when or where; I might even be thinking about a social occasion and forget completely that someone was there. I should point out at this juncture that I have never taken illegal drugs and I drink very little.

The only other thing I can think of that might be relevant is that I had a brief course of citalopram about six years ago that affected me very adversely; I had hallucinations for several days, and it was eventually determined that the dose I had been given was far too high for my condition. These symptoms cleared up very quickly when I came off the meds though, so I haven't really given it a thought since until recently. There's no family history of mental or neurological problems (apart from my grandfather having a minor stroke, but he was 84 and he recovered well) and nothing else I can think of that seems in any way connected.

I'm scared because I know just enough to understand that this range of neurological symptoms could be ominous, but not enough to be aware of the - probably countless - totally mundane explanations there could be. I literally cannot get a doctor to listen to me; I've had an eye check at their demand, I'm taking their painkillers for the headaches and I'm keeping my blood-sugar as constant as possible to combat the light-headedness, but I'm worried there's something wrong and I'm writing this because I'm desperate to know if these symptoms mean anything to anyone out there.

Please reply to this thread if you have any idea what all this means or even if it just sounds familiar - thanks all.