I had a thing with my shoulder, which gave me a new unpleasant physical sensation that was not pain, but was very uncomfortable. But it reminded me of something, and eventually I figured out what.
It was like when you’re carrying something heavy. Not so heavy that you have to set it down, but heavy enough that you’re glad to set it down, and when you set it down, whatever discomfort you have is now gone. Except I couldn’t relieve the sensation by setting anything down, since I wasn’t carrying anything, and I couldn’t relieve it any other way. I could partially relieve it by wedging my shoulder into a corner and leaning into it. It was like tension, only a little more than tension.
When I had my PT session I described this sensation as best I could, and my therapist fixed it, ending three days of something that was sort of like physical anxiety.
(Also, to the OP: great username and thread title combo)
I think most everyone experiences discomfort when exposed to certain odors. Smelling that smell, whether a noxious fume or overpowering fragrance, can be a most unpleasant sensation.
I have some body asymmetry issues that cause me discomfort. Hard to describe beyond I don’t have the same sensation on one side of my body as I do in the same place on the other side, which wigs me out!
I just had a similar experience at the dentist while having a root canal. It took a long time to numb up the molar, and the whole time I kept feeling strange sensations in and around my lips every time he’d drill … they weren’t painful (and before I was sufficiently numbed, I did experience real pain, and that was very unpleasant as well … but quite different) but they were very uncomfortable.
Maybe there’s some kind of “unpleasant!!!” circuitry in the brain that makes you feel that the particular sensation you’re feeling is bad, even when the sensation itself isn’t the same.
Also, I don’t know how related this is, but a while back I was browsing through Wikipedia in a manner similar to this, and I came across articles on “air hunger” and similar feelings. It intrigued me, and I found a paper about a study that demonstrated that people preferred intense pain to the sensation of needing to breathe. So, even though suffocation doesn’t exactly hurt, it’s even worse than hurting, in its way.
Sorry if that comes across as rambling and/or unclear. Tired.
This condition sounds miserable so I hope you get it diagnosed and treated. But the sensation you described reminds me exactly of how my scar felt after I had a mole removed on my leg over a decade ago. The incision was only about 1cm, but the depth was about 2cm into the tissue which obviously transected some nerves. The weird feeling lasted for several years after the surgery until the nerves gradually regenerated across the scar. The best I can describe the sensation is that it is something between a tickly numby itch and a dull long term static shock.
Ha! There* IS* another one out there. I’ve always called it (well to myself) “flexing my eardrums” because the noise seems to come from inside my ears.
I can do the same thing (I think), and I think it has something to do with Eustachian tubes. The rumbling sound is my own breathing (If I hold my breath, it stops.)
Did you grow up in a mountainous area? I did, and I think that has contributed to an unusual ability to control those muscles. As a kid, my ears were popping all the time due to changes in elevation, and I never took much notice.
Much as you’d like a specific diagnosis, it sounds more like a hyperchondriac/anxiety-style/oversensitive thing, really. Leave your syndrome unnamed, and it may just turn out to be part of your personality. Contribute to the Great Tapestry, and all that.
Well, it drove me crazy when I was a kid, but I feel like I have it under control now, so long as I remember to carry my fingernail clippers with me all the time. I’ve got some other medical issues that are more of a problem these days (I’m kind of a mess).
Oog. That sounds like a sory of buzzy itch-like sensation I get every so often. We really don’t have enough words to describe this kind of stuff
Yeah, when I was a kid, but I think they mostly wanted to see if I had a brain tumor. Sometimes I fell like diagnostic medicine is still a pretty primitive thing - we’ve gone from having a doctor look at you to see if anything is lumpy or funny-looking, to where a big fancy machine does scans of you, which a doctor looks at to see if anything is lumpy or funny-looking. Still a long way to go in terms of getting fundamental understanding of what’s going on with people.
Eh. I know what anxiety sensations feel like and this isn’t it. Intellectually, it bothers me to encounter aspects of human experience that I’m unable to satisfactorily describe, but what really prompted me to ask was being in the situation of trying to explain to my boss why I was trying to discreetly clip my fingernails at my desk. :smack: