Hi All. I am 55 year-old Caucasian female, who is a non-traditional medical student. September 30 of 2016 I was in a MVA but at first I thought it was “just a concussion,” despite being held in the hospital emergency room all day until I was able to make words again and someone could pick me up. Lots of pain, memory issues and word issues and such as well as headaches and neck aches. A few years later i was formally diagnosed with migraine. During that time, I also began my premed training and learned that I actually had a traumatic brain injury that led to that migraine, complete with vision and vestibular dysfunction, vergence insufficiency, and a few other items. During the Covid shut down my episodic migraine became chronic, due to lack of continuity of care. I also learned that I had developed both occipital and trigeminal neuralgias, as well as severe chronic MSK pain and spasticity. I have had a lot of triggerpoints and occipital nerve blocks, get Botox for migraine every 3 months, have changed my diet dramatically to be an autoimmune protocol based diet: low acid no gluten no nightshades, etc. I self inject monthly with the biologic Emgality . And all of that seemed to be really helping. By the summer of 2022, I thought I had everything well under control…!
I was packing up my life to move to Kansas for medical school, when I caught a really bad head cold that turned into a chest cold. I suspect it was Covid, but I never tested positive despite multiple tests. However, I surrounded by friends who were sick with the same symptoms and had tested positive for Covid.
I moved to Kansas and started medical school and within days, realized something was very wrong. I have never been in so much pain in my life. Within a few weeks I was suicidal and did not understand what was going on. My symptoms were drastically worsening by the day and I felt like I was having a panic attack nonstop.
My school is brand new and has a very BRIGHT and intense blue spectrum LED lighting installation that is so severe, combined with bright white walls and floors and reflective surfaces and bounced light not to mention large BRIGHT projection screens and monitors on almost all wall walls, adding additional light and reflection….after I had the suicidal thought, I requested a medical leave of absence and tried to figure out what was wrong with me.
Turns out my previously garden variety photophobia that was previously well-managed in my almost 30 years career as a Commercial/Film/TV visual effects supervisor, who was on set all the time, for living, and on monitors for a living …went into extreme overdrive and is now triggering everything dramatically. It also turns out that it triggers my inappropriate sinus tachycardia, a dysautonomia that I’ve recently been officially diagnosed with….Which I suspect I’ve had for a long time, and had such mild symptoms that never came up as an issue. Now I’m struggling to functioning on campus, even though I only have to be on campus a few days a week for labs - my school has provided reasonable accommodations of remote lectures, but refuses to extend accommodations for when I am forced to be on campus for labs - so I take a lot of drugs, prophylactically, I wear a neuromodulation device, a wide brimmed visor, Avulux filters or polarized lenses….yet it is completely physically, emotionally and cognitively exhausting and disabling.
It has completely annihilated me and I’m totally bewildered. I found this website doing a search for PubMed and related research on blue spectrum LED’s.
My MacBook Pro monitor is OK in dark mode, sonic hurts my eyes and my BenQ monitor is fairly tolerable, as long as it’s in dark mode.
The super blue LED headlights at night also annihilate me and make my face crawl with electricity, just like the lighting at school….
So what is going on with all of us?
also: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10052719/