If you’ve ever felt pancreatitis depression I’m sure that you are far from the only one.
This term or some variation of it is searched thousands of times every moth. And why wouldn’t those of us that suffer from either chronic pancreatitis or acute pancreatitis be depressed?
I mean, after all, the disease can be debilitating but many times the people around us don’t seem to think that it’s that bad.
Having a constant ache in your abdomen or the exhaustion that causes is not an outwardly terrible thing to suffer from compared to other things.
And certainly there are a lot of bad diseases out there but Pancreatitis, no matter what its form can be extremely painful.
Then there are gastrointestinal issues like nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and fat malabsorption that are often present and are not only distressing to have happen , but can impact our other activities
Pancreatitis Depression is also something that is hard to describe. I actually hate it when people give me that look that says “get over it” or “it can’t be that bad.”
But Depression is a common consequence of long term pain. It feels at times like I am carrying the weight of the world, doing the best I can with bearing the chronic pain and waiting for the next acute flare-up.
A recent study on Pancreatitis Depression even showed that 52% of the 692 study participants showed signs of major depression.
Pancreatitis Depression and Feelings of Isolation
The pain and all the side affects sometimes makes it hard to socialize and enjoy meals, causing feelings of isolation which can lead to even more depression.
One woman on one of the forums that I check every once in a while discussed how angry she was when her husband would sit and eat in front of her when she was unable to eat.
Which reminds me of every time that I go in the hospital. One of the first things that the Doctors always do is take you of any fluids and food while your pancreas calms down.
But if you are in a shared room they always seem to put you in with someone that is ordering food or something to drink every few minutes.
Pancreatitis Depression and Doctors
Then there are the hospital stays where or Doctor visits where the first question is always – do you drink alcohol?
They look at you like you caused the problem because you drink! Well I don’t drink and still got Pancreatitis. But then they look at you like you are lying.
No wonder people get Pancreatitis Depression!
Get Help With Pancreatitis Depression
If you think that you are dealing with depression make sure that you talk to your caregivers and loved ones about it.
Just having someone to talk to about your concerns or problems can be a big help.
But if that isn’t enough there are meds that can help to level you out and help you deal with the ups and downs of depression.
You don’t have to suck it up and deal with it alone!
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I am suffering 9 months of acute pancreatitus with no answers as to why and have been hospitalized over a dozen times. I am being sent to UCDavis for further research. I suffer a lot of pain and my quality of life has changed tremendously and I am very depressed while on 200mg Zoloft
I am so sorry to hear about your troubles. A lot of us that suffer from Pancreatitis never know exactly what causes it although recent studies have found a gene anomaly that makes people susceptible to it. Hopefully UCDavis can help you get some answers and relief from your pain.
Hello,
I can’t remember if I already contacted you, but this strangely overlooked infection is never even considered by almost all doctors due to misinformation. Since it causes hematological malignancies and precancerous conditions, can it cause pancreatic cancer? Since it causes cysts, can it cause pancreatic cysts? Since it causes inflammation, can it cause pancreatitis (it can cause hepatitis/hepatosplenomegaly)? It gave me apparent gall stones, and “mimics” inflammatory bowel disease.
Since it “mimics” autoimmune diseases, can it ever cause Type 1 Diabetes, due to the autoimmune destruction of pancreatic beta cells? This type of organism and mammals (which it can infect) are from the same clade, so does it cause autoantibodies because it has the same or similar molecules? (I think I read it has the same molecule as the myelin sheath of nerve cells, and it gave me symptoms of MS and ALS.). Can it ever cause Type 2 Diabetes?
Some online documents state this cancer-causing, mental illness-inducing common airborne pathogen that can cause so many idiopathic (unknown cause) diseases/conditions/symptoms is not zoonotic. That’s wrong! It’s carried by bats and shed in their feces. Bats evolved to deal with the photophobia and tinnitus it causes by hunting at night by echolocation.
My coworkers and I, all immunocompetent, got Disseminated Histoplasmosis from roosting bats (Mexican Free-tail in our case) that shed the fungus in their feces. The doctors said we couldn’t possibly have it, since we all had intact immune systems. The doctors were wrong. And we did not develop immunity over time. We’d get better and then progressively worse periodically and concurrently with similar various symptoms.
This underdiagnosed airborne infectious disease mimics colds, pneumonia, and the flu and can cause hematological malignancies, precancerous conditions, rheumatological diseases, connective tissue diseases, heart disease, autoimmune symptoms, inflammation, adrenal insufficiency, seizures, migraines, hydrocephalus, hallucinations, etc., etc. etc. and is often undiagnosed/misdiagnosed in immunocompetent people.
More than 100 outbreaks have occurred in the U.S. since 1938, and those are just the ones that were figured out, since people go to different doctors. One outbreak was over 100,000 victims in Indianapolis. 80-90+% of people in some areas have been infected, and it can lay dormant for up to 40 years in the lungs and/or adrenals.
It’s known to cause hematological malignancies, and some doctors claim their leukemia patients go into remission when given antifungal. My friend in another state who died from lupus lived across the street from a bat colony. An acquaintance with alopecia universalis and whose mother had degenerative brain disorder has bat houses on their property.
Researchers claim the subacute type is more common than believed and that many children in California have the subacute form. It’s known to at least “mimic” autoimmune diseases and cancer and known to give false-positives in PET scans. But no one diagnosed with an autoimmune disease or cancer is screened for it. In fact, at least one NIH paper states explicitly that all patients diagnosed with sarcoidosis be tested for it, but to my knowledge most, if not all, are not. Other doctors are claiming sarcoidosis IS disseminated histoplasmosis.
Many diseases it might cause are comorbid with other diseases it might cause, for example depression/anxiety/MS linked to Crohn’s. (It’s known to “mimic” inflammatory bowel disease.)
This pathogen parasitizes the reticuloendothelial system/invades macrophages, can infect and affect the lymphatic system and all tissues/organs, causes inflammation, granulomas, and idiopathic diseases and conditions, including myelitis, myositis, vasculitis, panniculitis, dysplasia, hyperplasia, hypervascularization, calcifications, sclerosis, fibrosis, necrosis, eosinophilia, leukopenia, anemia, neutrophilia, pancytopenia, thrombocytopenia, hypoglycemia, cysts, abscesses, polyps, stenosis, perforations, GI problems, hepatitis, focal neurologic deficits, etc.
I suspect the “side effects” of Haldol (leukopenia and MS symptoms) might not always be side effects but just more symptoms of Disseminated Histoplasmosis, since it causes leukopenia and MS symptoms. What about tinnitus, photophobia, psychosis “caused” by Cipro? Hypersexuality and leukemia “caused” by Abilify? Humira linked to lymphoma, leukemia and melanoma in children?
What if this infection that made us so ill isn’t rare in immunocompetent people? What if just the diagnosis is rare, since most doctors ignore it? I mean, we couldn’t possibly have been the only people in the world suffering from Disseminated Histoplasmosis undiagnosed/misdiagnosed by doctors.
Older documents state people who spend time around bats/in caves are known to get Disseminated Histoplasmosis, but the info appears to have been lost, for the most part. And now it’s illegal in England to block a bat’s access to their roost, resulting in things like bat feces falling into wine as it’s being blessed in churches. People buy bat houses for their properties at Lowe’s and Home Depot (because bats and honeybees, unlike humans, are assured a home by the government. But I digress…), people wander through caves for fun, and bat conservationists encourage people to leave bats in buildings/homes. What a terrible mistake those “experts” have made.
The fungus is an Onygenale?/Oxygenale?…whatever…and don’t they consume collagen/keratin? It’s known to cause connective tissue diseases (like scleroderma and/or myxomatous degeneration?), rheumatological conditions, seizures, and mental illness. Fungal hyphae carry an electrical charge and align under a current. It causes RNA/DNA damage. It’s known to cause delusions, wild mood swings (pseudobulbar affect?), and hallucinations. It’s most potent in female lactating bats, because the fungus likes sugar (lactose) and nitrogen (amino acids, protein, neurotransmitters?), releasing lactase and proteinases to obtain them. What about female lactating humans…postpartum psychosis? (And don’t some of those poor women also have trouble swallowing?) The bats give birth late spring/summer, and I noticed suicide rates spike in late spring/early summer. It’s known to cause retinal detachment, and retinal detachments are known to peak around June-July/in hot weather. A map of mental distress and some diseases appear to almost perfectly overlay a map of Histoplasmosis. Cancer is known to occur more often near rivers than in mountains or deserts, just like this infection. Johns Hopkins linked autism to an immune response in the womb. Alzheimer’s was linked to hypoglycemia, which can be caused by chronic CNS histoplasmosis.
The bats eat moths, which are attracted to blue and white city lights that simulate the moon the moths use to navigate. Bats feed up to 500 feet in the air and six miles away in any direction from their roost, but not when it’s raining or when the temperature is less than approximately 56° F. The fungus can grow in bird/chicken feces, but birds don’t carry it because their body temperature is too high, killing the fungus.
From my experience, I learned that no doctor, at least in DFW, will suspect subacute and/or progressive disseminated histoplasmosis in immunocompetent people. Some doctors, at least the ones I went to, will actually refuse to test for it, even when told someone and their coworkers have all the symptoms and spend a lot of time in a building with bats in the ceiling. Victims will be accused of hypochondriasis. (My doctors told me only farmers or AIDS patients get it, it’s only in bird feces, and it always infects the lungs…wrong, wrong, and wrong!) In fact, the first doctor to diagnose me was a pulmonologist, and the only reason he examined me was to try to prove that I didn’t have it, when I really did. No doctor I went to realized bats carry the fungus. And NO doctor I went to in DFW, even infectious disease “experts,” understand the DISSEMINATED form, just the pulmonary form, and the only test that will be done by many doctors before they diagnose people as NOT having it is an X-ray, even though at least 40-70% of victims will have no sign of it on a lung X-ray. It often gives false-negatives in lab tests (some people are correctly diagnosed only during an autopsy, if then, after obtaining negative test results) and cultures may not show growth until after 6-12 weeks of incubation (but some labs report results after only a couple of weeks).
One disease of unknown cause that could be caused by Disseminated Histoplasmosis: I suspect, based on my and my coworker’s symptoms (during our “rare” infectious disease outbreak) and my research, that interstitial cystitis and its comorbid conditions can be caused by disseminated histoplasmosis, which causes inflammation throughout the body, causes “autoimmune” symptoms, and is not as rare as believed. I read that “interstitial cystitis (IC) is a chronic inflammatory condition of the submucosal and muscular layers of the bladder, and the cause is currently unknown. Some people with IC have been diagnosed with other conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, allergies, and Sjogren’s syndrome, which raises the possibility that interstitial cystitis may be caused by mechanisms that cause these other conditions. In addition, men with IC are frequently diagnosed as having chronic nonbacterial prostatitis (it likes zinc, and doesn’t the prostate have a lot of zinc?), and there is an extensive overlap of symptoms and treatment between the two conditions, leading researchers to posit that the conditions may share the same etiology and pathology.” Does that sound like Disseminated Histoplasmosis to you?
My coworkers and I were always most ill around May, presumably since the Mexican Free-tail bats gave birth in Texas during May (and the fungus was most potent), relapsing late fall/Thanksgiving to December, for some unknown reason (maybe migrating bats from the north?). We had GI problems, liver problems, weird rashes (erythema nodosum, erythema multiforme, erythema marginatum/annulare, etc.), plantar fasciitis, etc., and I had swollen lymph nodes, hives, lesions, abdominal aura, and started getting migraines and plantar fasciitis in the building, and I haven’t had them since I left. It gave me temporary fecal incontinence, seizures, dark blood from my intestines, tinnitus, nystagmus, excessive yawning, inability to raise my arms at my shoulders, blurry vision/floaters/flashes of light, benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, isolated diastolic hypertension, what felt like burning skin, various aches and pains (some felt like pin pricks and pinches), tingling, tremors, restless genital syndrome, “explosions” like fireworks in my head while sleeping, and temporary blindness. Suddenly I was allergic to Comice pears, my lower lip swelling from the juice (latex fruit allergy or oral allergy syndrome?). I had insomnia (presumably from the fungus acidifying the blood, releasing adrenaline) and parasomnias. It felt like strong bursts of electrical shocks or strong steady electrical currents in my body, which now feel like low electrical currents at times, only at night. I was always worse at night. (Because bats are feeding? Or maybe because fungus follows a circadian rhythm?).
I suddenly had symptoms of several inflammatory/autoimmune diseases, including Fibromyalgia, Sarcoidosis, ALS, MS, Sjogren’s syndrome, etc. that have disappeared since leaving the area and taking nothing but Itraconazole antifungal. No one, including doctors (we all went to different ones), could figure out what was wrong with us, and I was being killed by my doctor, who gave me progressively higher and higher doses of Prednisone (1-2 years after I already had Disseminated Histoplasmosis) after a positive ANA titer, until I miraculously remembered that a visiting man once told my elementary school class that bats CARRY histoplasmosis. There’s a lot more. I wrote a book about my experience with Disseminated Histoplasmosis called “Batsh#t Crazy,” (now you know where that term, “bats in the attic/belfry,” and “going batty” came from) because bats shed the fungus in their feces and it causes delusions and hallucinations, I suspect by the sclerotia fungal mycelia can form emitting hallucinogens (like psilocybin and dimethyltryptamine) along with inflammation in the CNS. (Schizophrenics have 2X of a chemical associated with yeast, part of the fungal life cycle.)
Thank you for your time,
Susan McIntyre
P.S. Doesn’t this infection share all the same symptoms with Gulf War Syndrome?
This is quite a story and illustrate how hard it can be to get the care that you need.