Check your plan for the cost of a video consultation; it’s worth the $35 just to get feedback on whether your symptoms require more diagnosis or not. I hate going to doctors, too (I have literally cleaned, sterilized, and derma-bonded/closured deep wounds to avoid going to the ER) but chills and a comsistantly low core body temperature are concerning enough to get checked out, and will cost you a lot less to deal with now than to later find that you have a condition that progresses to hospitalization.
If your only signs/symptoms are a temperature of 96 and you feel cold and you shiver BUT you warm up if you get under a nice warm blanket, it’s probably ok to to do watchful waiting for a couple of days. Take some tylenol too, see if it changes things.
BUT. If you have other symptoms like sweats, pains in muscles/joints, atypical (for you) headaches, nausea/vomiting/diarrhea, mental status changes, etc. then I’d advocate getting checked out sooner.
Feeling cold and running lower body temperatures are not uncommon findings for folks as they get into their mid 60’s and beyond especially when cooler weather moves in. If you’ve lost body fat over the last few months or so that can amplify the phenomenon.
And, as others have affirmed, lower body temps generally make people feel colder, NOT warmer. At least not until severe, possibly terminal hypothermia is reached. THEN folks tend to feel hot and strip off their clothes. Then they tend to die.
a.k.a. “paradoxical undressing”. @Qadgop_the_Mercotan is providing a someone hyperbolic condition, but it does happen in extreme cases (usually involving some combination of fatigue and exhaustion, dehydration, and alcohol or drug consumption).
Side anecdote: my Wilderness First Responder instructor who had worked mountain search & rescue for many years actually had a case of someone with hypothermia trying to take off clothes, which was pretty amusing in the telling. Unfortunately, during our scenarios one of the students playing a victim of hypothermia decided to replicate the incident for laughs and stripped down to his briefs before the instructors came over and stopped him, and the entire class got a talking to about making the scenarios realistic, but not too realistic, h’okay?
A few years ago I did an early spring group kayak whitewater trip. Previous years I’d worn a wetsuit, but I never dumped my boat, so I decided to just go with jeans and a hoodie. Temperature was in the low 40s.
I ended up misreading a rapid and going in the water. I was cold. When I got home I was still cold. My temperature was 95.8. A hot shower, then blankets didn’t help.
My gf suggested I sit in the sauna. I hadn’t thought of that. We have a small sauna that we never use. So i cranked the heat up and sat in a very hot sauna until I was sweating and uncomfortably hot.
Spot on - I’ve intentionally lost 33 lbs over 13 weeks via diet and a shitton of exercise. I’ve wondered if that’s why I feel so frozen, and maybe should have included that info. I’m 61ish and yes, body temperature has gotten slightly weirder for me sometimes. Good call.
Thanks, doc, I’m going to watch stuff for a few days. I appreciate the careful opinion and I respect your expertise. Thanks so much!!!
This is why you should go see a doctor. You put out a statement of not feeling well; only when a real but random internet doc comes along do you disclose additional details; a conversation with a doctor can tease out additional details that you’ve left out that will lead them to believe that it’s nothing to worry about, you’re gonna die, or somewhere in between.
,
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Many centuries ago, your condition was blamed on demons and worse. The only possible solution was to pray to the gods, offer sacrifices, and appease the demonic crowd. Thank your lucky stars that we have much better knowledge now due to science.
To echo the contemporary crowd, see a fucking doctor, and be glad you can.
The last couple of days, I’ve been cold. And achy. No cold symptoms like runny nose or cough.
My oral temp was at 98 degrees, so just a little low.
Now my house does take wild temperature swings, but my wife deals with it with aplomb. 66 degrees in bedroom and she’s not even totally under the blankets.
I knew I was kinda sick, with whatever. but got up and went to my office above the bedroom. Fuzzy slippers, jeans, tee-shirt, thick hooded sweat shirt. And a blanket. Also a halogen desk desk lamp to warm my hands and a space heater pointing at my legs. Still could not get warm.
I felt pretty good, but about every two minutes, shivers would shoot down my back and legs.
I said screw it, and climbed back in bed with another blanket. About 15 minutes later, I was throwing up. Some kind of low grade flu I guess. Had COVID and flu shots 5 days ago. Perhaps a delayed reaction.
I refuse to run the heat part of the winter because natural gas is so freaking expensive in California, so sometimes I’ll wear a pair of these around the house - fingerless gloves!
Scary true story here. About 10 years ago I got a very strange call from my husband. We were separated at the time and were living about 30 miles apart. He said he was so cold, couldn’t get warm, sounded confused. I told him to hang up and dial 911 immediately. Then I also called emergency services in his town and started driving down there. When I arrived he was already in the ER under a “Bair” blanket. Within 1/2 hour he became very agitated and aggressive, pulled out his IV line and started down the hallway. He was convinced he was being kept prisoner somewhere.
What followed was a week of full-blown hallucinations; he didn’t recognize me or his children, and he was sure he was imprisoned in another country. It was against hospital rules to restrain patients physically, so they kept him (mildly) sedated and a family member had to be in the room at all times because he would try to make a run for it. We never got an official diagnosis, but one of the nurses said it looked like viral encephalitis to her. He gradually made a full recovery, but the visions he had during that period were so detailed that he spoke of them as real experiences for a couple of years afterward.
And the first symptom was not being able to regulate his temperature.
OK, that came out really weird. My extended metabolic panel is all over the place. Liver stuff 20x normal. But a sample bunch of tests I did just 3-4 weeks ago have also changed drastically:
Glucose: 92->116
BUN 8->32
Creatinine .9 → 1.2
eGFR 97->69
The BUN one really catches my eye: 4 fold increase in less than a month? Also the glucose, but that may be a fasting vs not thing. I thought both times I fasted (I was/am intermittent fasting, first meal at 7pm, only intake during the day is black coffee and sparkling water).
The rest of this more detailed panel was crazypants:
AST 683 (normal 0-37)
ALT 383 (normal 0-60)
Doc was like: you need to quit drinking. Forever. Now. I’m like: I have a single 19-24oz beer in the evening. Seriously?
I don’t even know what to think of all this. I’m a little suspicious I’ll follow up with my GP in a month and the numbers will be all over the place in completely different ways, and wondering if the labs went sideways.
I lost 18% of my body weight in like 12 weeks (intentionally!) is that just f-ing me up? Puzzled puzzled. For now alcohol is banished (dammit!). @Qadgop_the_Mercotan: answer here or DM me, I have much more metabolic info.
They’re also going to do an ultrasound of my gut tomorrow morning, no idea why.
But firstly I’d say your renal function (BUN, Cr, GFR) aren’t horribly out of whack, and those values can change in hours based on hydration status and other stuff. Needs rechecking, but probably an effect of whatever’s going on and not the cause.
Your elevated AST and ALT are more worrisome. I suspect the ultrasound is to look at your liver and gall bladder. I would hope they drew some labs to check for infectious hepatitis (I’d want to check for A, B, and C).
Also, intermittent fasting can cause elevated liver enzymes like yours, though it’s not that common. It is more often seen after a prolonged fast followed by refeeding. So that’s more of a long shot.
It’s good you are avoiding alcohol. Any amount of ethanol is toxic to the liver, and with yours acting oddly, it’s best to cut out all such liver irritants.
There’s plenty of possible causes for your symptoms and results, but right now focusing on the more likely causes is the best bet. Ultrasound will show if there are gallstones, fatty liver, liver enlargement, and may show other lesions or strictures too. Blood tests for hepatitis antibodies can assess for infection.
Feel free to DM me some more if you don’t want your other labs appearing here. We can chat further in DM, though here we have the opportunity to get further thoughts from the Dope’s other doctors, most of whom are still actually practicing.
I’m willing to anonymize my general health panel if we want to have an MD party in the thread. I’d just make a pure ASCII list of test results, no IDing info, no health org, no graphics, no PDF, no nothing. Not sure who to invite; you, QtM, would be more aware of the who’s-who docs here I think.
But I’m a little worried all this would run afoul of board rules and get shuttered.