First GP appointment - anything I need to cover?

Hi all,

I’m really just looking for a bit of advice here - I have an appointment with my GP first thing Friday morning to discuss symptoms that I’m experiencing, and my concerns around MS.

To give you a bit of background, I started suffering from severe/life limiting fatigue around two years ago, and combined with muscle stiffness/soreness with no explanation I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome around a year ago. I have followed a typical CFS pattern of relapse/improvement/relapse/etc. However, in my most recent relapse I started experiencing new symptoms that aren’t “that typical” of CFS - primarily tremors and tingling in my hands.

My intention is to go to my appointment with a list of my symptoms, delineated by the ones that I’ve had since the start, and the newer ones (circa 4 months now), like so:

Oldest

  • Fatigue
  • Muscle stiffness/weakness
  • Unexplained pain (primarily in joints)
  • Low mood
  • Brain fog

Newest

  • Tremors & tingling in hands
  • Dizziness and instability

Things like vision problems are hard to classify as I’ve had glasses since I was about four years old, but I’ve found myself needing to close one eye to focus on specific things more often occasionally (and I have an eye test tomorrow to check on this), so I’m not intending to mention this.

Is there anything else it would be worthwhile to prepare before my appointment? Thanks to the brain fog I will feel much more comfortable if I have everything ready to go, and after how long it took me to get a CFS diagnosis, I’m scared of being put back in the ringer of endless blood tests and discussing the same things over and over again.

Hello

Welcome to the forum.

To be honest, you’ve pretty much covered it. Taking lists of symptoms is what you need to do. The only thing I would add would be rough dates as to when things have happened. You’ve said your CFS has covered a relapse/recovery pattern, but if you could stick dates on your symptoms over say, the last couple of years, it might help. If anything has not completely recovered back to ‘normal’, you should mention this.

Best of luck for Friday.

Sue