What Tests Should I Get

[steel_reserve]

My greatest health problem is sleep disturbances and sleep attacks during the day.

My parents tell me that when I was a child I would wake up after a few hours of sleep and start playing. I would wake my brother up at night to have someone to play with.

Once puberty struck, all I did was sleep. I would fall asleep at school. I would usually take a nap when I got home from school. I often would wake up, eat dinner, and go back to bed for the rest of the night. I could fall asleep any time anywhere.

The doctor said because I was growing so much and my liver was so large that it was just a growing thing. "Shove food down his throat and he'll be ok."

These sleeping problems caused a lot of problems in college. I had a sleep study done and they said in 9 hours I woke up 32 times. Most of them were for only a few seconds, so I couldn't remember them.

The scary part is when I'm falling asleep driving. My thinking and speaking is not affected, but I CANNOT keep my eyes straight. I start pulling my arm hair and I get a sudden rush of attention almost like experiencing sudden, severe pain.

I've tried so many supplements just to see what would happen. Taking DIM didn't help with my sleep attacks, but it did help me sleep more soundly, for the first time in my life I was making precum and suddenly had muscles. (I was always a bony, skinny thing. My wife said when she met me she thought I had some kind of illness.)

The only relief I've found with the sleep attacks was cutting out starch and drinking a lot of OJ.

My second health issue is early heart beats. The only way to control this was to limit salt intake. My chiropractor used some kind of touch response test on my and said that it was actually a sensitivity to iodine.

Swiping the salt off of fries, limiting my use of simply saline, and cooking with kosher salt made my heart feel a certain steady confidence that I've never felt before. I would often get this hesitant sensation in my chest when I had these early beats.



Any suggestions on where to start with blood tests would be greatly appreciated.



edit: Personality wise I have always been known to be flat. It's very very difficult to get be angry or excited. I had a slow en utero heart beat.

 

[michael94]

Prolactin and TSH are pretty good places to start. Prolactin is a good surrogate for estrogen/serotonin and give you a good idea of how much inflammation you are dealing with. TSH you want under 1 but it's not fool proof thanks to PUFA blocking t3 at many levels.

 

[tara]

Welcome steel_reserve.

I'm not expert on blood tests.
I do recommend monitoring:
Body temps (eg waking, an hour after breakfast, afternoon) and resting heartrate - these can give an indication of base metabolism.
Breathing - mouth breathing and chest breathing can be hyperventilation, which can mess badly with sleep. These can be retrained.
Nutrition - what and how much are you eating?- some of us use chronometer to check this (don't believe their calorie recommendations).

If you haven't yet, I'd start reading Peat's articles, eg starting with the ones on thyroid.