I have been diagnosed with vitamin b12 deficiency and i am convinced i am going to have a heart attack or having one.i have no chest pain just achey twinge in arm now and again
I had my first injection 3 days ago and feel strange in a bad way especially anixious please someone help
Repair of nerves from the B12 injection can bring on new symptoms that were not evident before one starts on injections.
These new symptoms can be counterintuitive - i.e. Pain, hunger, anger (were mine). Your's may be different so I can't really speak to specific symptoms.
To be able to better understand how your body is reacting to the B12, and to understand where you may have had nerve damage, start a logbook of all your symptoms and try to assess a severity score for each on a daily basis. Start monitoring yourself and when you visit your GP explain what you are doing and provide a list to him to hold and ask for it to be included in your file.
Many people end up asking for more frequent injections and GPs tend to treat this as anxiety or hypochondria with antidepressants. While these may help in the short term, they can also cause further nerve damage if you really need more B12. The GP wants evidence that you need more injections so start gathering it for him/her.
Anxiety is a psychological symptom that results from neurological damage in the brain. The mind is trying to function in a deficient brain and in trying to explain what it thinks is going on, it gets anxious. B12 starts the repair of the damage but the repair of nerves is very slow.
These psychological symptoms normally arise from the B12 deficiency itself but can also appear after injections start. The new symptoms that appear after injections are really illusions and if you can convince yourself by monitoring your logbook that these in fact are illusions, you can work through them.
It takes the brain about 3 days to recalibrate to the stronger signals that it is receiving and processing.
Worry and stress make things seem worse. If you can convince yourself that these are "good" symptoms they seem to go away faster.
You may also feel you are on a roller coaster of highs and lows.
That is my experience.
Real symptoms like a heart attack do not go away and if you develop chest pain go to the hospital.
I haven't got no symptoms of heart attack other than aching.
My heart beats per min is 69 so healthy and normal.its the aniexty winning and its making feel like i am going crazy
That feeling of going crazy is one of the psychological symptoms of the B12 deficiency.
I had it too. But once I was able to monitor myself with the logbook, it just became another symptom to monitor as I didn't act on it because I knew it was an illusion.
Just wish there was a positive helpful site unstead of me being silly and using google as thats where the bad stuff come from so far its heart attack,stroke and cancer.x
I've found this site to be pretty helpful for me. I still check google but that is getting less frequent.
Reading the links that the administrators provide has helped and the support I've seen them give is really great.
Unfortunately "pernicious" means deadly and so you've got to take everything seriously because it is our lives we are thinking about.
Getting back to some semblance of "normal" was all I could manage. I've had nerve damage and those symptoms do not go away.
I'm positive now because I know that the stuff on this site works. But when I started on B12 injections and started learning more about B12D I got really scared. That's where you are now and you are trying to understand how much nerve damage you already have.
The progress to repair nerve damage is very slow but don't give up. Any further blood test should show high levels of B12 and you need to stay there to allow the nerve repair to occur.
Are you taking folic acid and a daily multivitamin as well? These support B12 in doing its job.
No not yet as gp said injections nothing about added as it won't absorb ?
Would it help to take them ?
B12 needs folic acid and the multivitamin to do its job
The aching is what your brain thinks is pain from the stronger signal from nerve repair.
Start "range of motion" exercises by moving your arms and legs around and over your head. It may be hard at first but once the muscles get going things to get easier. It is the getting started that is hard and that just makes us not want to do anything.
The repair of the damage nerve is triggered by trying to use the muscle that it is attached to.
For the brain, there are short term memory tests on the internet that help exercise the brain. Games like solitaire, free cell and mahjong also do similar exercises for the short term memory. Time yourself to measure how fast your brain is working. You will see improvements right after the injection that taper off as you get low on B12.
I can not thank you enough i am sorry for being a drama queen but its so hard right now
Certainly do feel like a roller coaster and i wanna get off.
Thank you for helping.i am really struggling x
as pvanderaa says anxiety is among the symptoms of b12 deficiency - and one reason it may get worse when you start on injections may be the role B12 plays in the regulation of the recycling of neurotransmitters.
anxiety and depression were amongst my first symptoms and the anxiety certainly got worse after treatment for me as well.
you may find this link useful in terms of understanding how the anxiety is working and finding a way of dealing with it for yourself.
healthunlocked.com/couchtob....
The pain in your arm is more likely to be related to neuropathy and or neurotransmitters having gone temporarily in to overdrive than it is related to heart and the anxiety is probably more about your brain trying to tell you that being anxious isn't good ... but it has a very strange way of doing it which goes back to the days when we were hunter gatherers and stress responses were about getting out of physical rather than psychological danger.
Hi Kalimeders one of the worse thing you can do is stress about things as this just uses up the B12 to no purpose and I often get palpitations after an injection and I've been having them for 45 years.
Hopefully things will calm down but it's as well to be aware that it is not uncommon for symptoms to appear to get worse before they get better as the B12 starts to repair the damage done to your nervous system caused by the deficiency.
Perhaps you would like to tell us why you think, or have been told, you were deficient in the first place.
As pvanderaa said above you need a healthy level of Folate (aka folic acid) to process the B12 you are having injected so please check with your doctor.
I got diagnosed after having my baby with very low vitamin b12.they think i have had it for a while and that was probably the reason i suffered 2 miscarriages.
I am having weekly injections for 4 weeks then monthly injections
The last two people on a long list of persons at risk of B12 Deficiency are as follows
"Women with a history of infertility or multiple miscarriages.
Infants born to and/or breast fed by women who are symptomatic or are at risk for B12 deficiency".
I am not a medically qualified person but please, I think it would be a good idea to check with your doctor whether your baby might be B12 deficient especially if you are breastfeeding exclusively.
I wish you both well.
Thank you.i will speak to my gp about this.his not breast fed as i got shingles when he was only 5 weeks old so had to stop feeding.
Hopefully there will be enough in the baby's liver at birth and B12 in the formula you feed with now but better to be safe.
Sorry to read about the shingles too. Take care now.
Sorry to jump in on this thread. I always get palpitations for about 3 days following an injection. Should I do anything about this , seeing the Gp on Friday. I have upped my potassium intake but it's no better. I'm injecting every fortnight at the moment but was on weekly. Any advice greatly appreciated
Thanks
So do I Julie74 but it may be worth chatting to the doctor about it whilst you are there.
I've been having B12 injections for 45 years
I get palpitations
Is it normal to feel super tired after injection?
Numbness/pins and needles comes and goes - Is this normal
Is this normal if my treatment is working?
