Chiari Malformation: My Scary Diagnosis

I'm 26. I always thought the very best year of my life would be when I was 25, but that's the year I got sick. It all started with a really traumatic trip from Nebraska to my home in Washington. I got to experience my first ever anxiety attack on that trip and ended up in the hospital. Unfortunately none of those doctors knew how to recognize a simple panic attack and I ended up staying in that hospital for an entire week while they put me through a lot of invasive and painful tests finally ending up in a misdiagnosis.

Due to that experience I deal with a lot of stress and anxiety issues I've never had to deal with before, so when I started having dizziness spells that we just assumed it was the anxiety.

Then the headaches started.

My headaches came on whenever I did something even mildly strenuous. I would have a horrible migraine type headache from doing basic things like running to the door for a package delivery, bedtime activities with my husband, and bending down for the laundry. Anything that caused my heart rate to increase and I had a horrible tension headache for several seconds, then it would go away and I would feel extremely exhausted and have to lie down.

How do you know if your headaches are serious? You go into the doctor and tell him your symptoms; he looks at you in a concerned way and says, "I'm going to order an MRI for you. You should make the appointment as soon as possible." I'd gone through an MRI with contrast in the hospital I'd been at on the trip home and they'd injected the dye into my muscle so an MRI is really something I did not want to do again, but my doctor convinced me to try an open MRI.

I called and set up the open MRI appointment. If you need to get an MRI of your head let me clarify something, open MRI's are not open for your head. True, you don't have to go into a small tube, and if you look as far to your left as possible you can see the side of the room, but your head is still in the head cage and the big plate of the machine is still inches from your nose. I did a lot of praying while in that MRI.