“Low-D” update

I have been taking a daily supplement of vitamin D for the last couple of weeks, and there are early indications that this 5000 IU daily supplement is helping a number of issues that I had earlier attributed to NA.

The biggest thing is the reduction of nerve/muscle fatigue.  During my regular physical therapy sessions, I had been asked to exercise using an arm exercise style “bike”.   This is on a machine that has an arm crank that you turn using different settings to achieve goals of reconditioning your upper arms and shoulders.  While initially doing this exercise prior to my taking the D3, I had trouble turning this for more than a couple of minutes with very little to no resistance.  As the Borg would have said, “Resistance was futile.”  A couple of times I had to stop before reaching the preset goal of only ten minutes, and it felt extremely hard to go past 5 minutes.

Now since taking D3, the last few times I have had no sensation of fatigue in the early going, and this is with the settings now on what they call “constant work.”  This setting really is weird in that if you maintain a certain speed you do not really feel the resistance. If you go too slowly, the resistance sets in.  But the key is that you have to go faster. Before the addition of vitamin D supplement, when I finished the 10 minutes, I could usually end up around 1.0-1.1 miles on a good day and usually in the .9-1.0 mile range, with no resistance set.  Since the addition of vitamin D, I have been regularly hitting 1.3-1.4 with a high of 1.5 miles using resistance setting as constant work.  And at the end of 10 minutes, I now feel as if I could go on for a longer time.  It is true that I feel like my muscles are getting tired during this, but I can tell that they recover while still exercising and the strength is not negatively impacted.  This has made a real difference in my physical therapy.

My therapists had been concentrating on having me do stretching exercises and including the exercise bike if my arms would tolerate it.  Now my therapy is being geared to a more active use of my arms.  Instead of passive stretching, I am actively using my arms within my achievable range of motion with a ling term goal of increasing strength.  This is closer to what my arms would be doing in the real world.

A few days ago, I also tried to do a pushup.  I was not successful.  My shoulder still has too much pain with certain actions.  But my left leg feels stronger at my hip, and my right leg just above my ankle is much stronger when driving around town.  That had been getting worse and I had been getting a bit more worried that my ongoing weakness would impact my ability to do necessary driving; like to doctors for me and my significant other, grocery shopping, etc.

"Could it be low-D? " (Vitamin D3 that is. . .)

Long time readers will remember how I have often wondered if my weakness, tremors and all other weirdness that did not quite all jive with my understanding of HNA were really a part of that illness or some other odd thing a bunch of doctors may have missed. . .  Well, it may well be something the doctors missed that was caught by my Physicians’ Assistant.

In a routine (yeah, like a $2,000.00 test can be routine) MRI of my neck looking for source of arm pain, in an aside, the pathologist said it looked like I might have a small lesion on my parathyroid.  Hmm. On my parathyroid?  Yes.  Well, my thyroid recently came up with a nodule that is benign and thyroid function was normal.  So, my PA ordered a test of parathyroid which was off the charts high for PTH, but showed normal for calcium.  Before the lab had a chance to get rid of the rest of my sample, he ordered a vitamin D test, which showed extremely low vitamin D.  What does this mean?

Well, the parathyroid regulates calcium and phosphates and is linked to vitamin D levels.  I am lucky that my case of hyperparathyroidism seems (so far anyway) to have been caused by low vitamin D. If this is true, I should be able to reverse it with additional supplements of vitamin D.  How does this relate to my weirdness of tremor, weakness and muscle fatigue?  Evidently, low vitamin D not only can cause  secondary hyperparathyroidism, but it also contributes to muscle weakness, tremor, fatigue and even in adults some risk of malformed bones- maybe like what is happening to my pinky of right hand.  The cause of D deficiency varies, but leading culprit is long term vegetarian diets and lack of sun exposure.   If you are worried about sun, use blockers. If you do not eat much red meat or eat other things that have no D3, use a supplement.

I will let you know if the supplement works.

Updated- Yes, the vitamin D supplement has done its thing.  My PTH is now in the normal range, and this is also true for vitamin D levels.  Overall I feel a bit better, but no where near anything approaching normal.  It is one less thing to worry about though. . .