When my vision started to blacken I knew I wasn’t crazy, something was actually wrong.
I was diagnosed with B6 toxicity last October. While developing the toxicity sucked, detoxing and the corresponding nerve healing was the worst experience of my life.
I had developed neuropathy, damage to nerves, which can be sensory, motor, or autonomic. I had neuropathy of all three categories. I had been on a 200mg B6 supplement for about 7 years and all of the excess B6 had steadily absorbed itself into my muscles and nerves, eventually killing nerve cells across the whole body. Even 20mg daily for that length of time can cause toxicity in some people.
The detox was the worst. The first three weeks involved a myriad of symptoms including hallucinations, derealization and depersonalization, feeling like I was constantly waking up, nausea, difficulty speaking, delirium, intense tinnitus, crazy brain fog, and nervous system freak out mode to the point of paranoia, with a splash of hyper sensitivity to any sounds and visual stimulation. Also inability to regulate body temperature, chills, shakes, and full body twitching. Plus chest tightness, clenched stomach, bloating, soreness in the rib cage, pins and needles everywhere, muscle soreness… basically take any function of the nervous system and make it disregulated.
Then came the slow steady and sometimes backwards path to healing. B6 deadens the nerve cells, and as the B6 is removed and the nerve cells start to heal and regrow the numbness is replaced with pain and discomfort. While the intensity decreased, I had spells of the previously mentioned symptoms for about 8 months and then flare ups from there from time to time, with the last flare up being a couple of months ago, but some lingering tinnitus and some minor other symptoms that are manageable to deal with with still occurring.
Last night as I replayed this in my mind I could feel my body twitching in memory, and my ears ringing a chorus in response. Sometimes I completely forget about the toxicity because it is easier than remembering it, even though it was only months ago.
I was on intermittent disability for a year.
It was really hard to explain all of this to people because I looked fine on the outside and I had never heard of anyone else overdosing on vitamins. I was an otherwise healthy 37 year old man who had to lay down for naps throughout the day, sometimes just on the kitchen floor. Sometimes I felt at 80%, and other times I felt at 10% out of nowhere. I was powerless to do anything but let my body detox and heal.
I have a hard time asking for help, and I felt crazy explaining it to people – I could barely even track the symptoms myself there were so many. I logged a symptom journal for a year and it looked insane.
Anyhow, I have shared parts of this story with people close to me but most people probably didn’t even know I was going through anything. The mental toll was really rough, knowing there was no quicker path through. I suffered from anxiety and depression, both as side effects of the detox, and as a result of the difficulty. If you look at pictures of me one month and three months in you’d have no idea how much I was struggling (see slides 3 and 4). And I truly felt fine sometimes, especially if I stayed active. But there was always a crash, at least once a week for the first 4 months that lasted for days.
It made me feel useless and incompetent as a human a lot of the time. My biggest fear at that time was being given up on.
It was a lot on my family, but I was loved when I was at my worst, and wasn’t given up on.
May you be loved and not given up on when you are at your worst.
Love,
Scotty