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[bluezebracat]

Every year in the fall, I have a bizarre attack in my lower belly.  As in, my intestines seem to kink (doctor's suggestion) because of stress (doctor's theory) and I am hit with so much pain that I pass out or fall to the floor.  This is a bit embarrassing because it can happen anywhere.  Apparently I'm hyperventilating because I lose feeling in my hands and feet (pins and needles); sight and hearing fade momentarily (pain and hyperventilating).  After I come to, I feel terribly weak and need a day or two to recover.  And it never happens again in the year (weird, right?).  This has been going on for almost two decades.

I'm in good health otherwise, and these attacks have no relation to whether I'm engaging in good habits or not, or what I eat or not.  Hence the physician's not so assuring or definitive determination of: you have a gut that's more sensitive to stress; the beginning of the school year is stressful, don't you know you have more nerve endings in your gut that your epidermis (is that true?).  I just don't feel more stressed in the fall than at any other time (why doesn't this happen at the beginning of the spring semester?) so I feel like hu's logic may be dubious.

Anyway.  The question is--does anyone else have bizarre twitches, acceleration in symptoms or suffer negative health issues around or shortly after the school year starts? 

[zarathustra]

Wow, BZC, that's no fun at all.  I haven't heard of anything like that before, but I hope you find some solutions.

 Have you noted specifically when these attacks occur...like always within 3 weeks of the semester starting, or always in September, or something?  When it started 20 years ago, were you teaching then or still in school?  Are there any other significant dates in the fall it could be linked to, like someone's passing or an accident, or anything? 

Have you ever tried specific stress-reducing exercises to try to manage the stress (if that's what it is) before it gets a chance to kick in?  Would you say you are the kind of person who can keep trucking despite monster stress, thereby making the stress go "under cover," so to speak? 

This is intriguing. 

[elsie]

I currently have my annual early fall semester upper respiratory virus. Never fails. As soon as the weather starts to cool and the virus starts making its way around campus, here it comes.

[bluezebracat]

In my case it seems to be a flare up of the vagus (sic?) nerve--the only description I've found of something similar seems to come from IBS sufferers.  But that's a guess. It's weird.  Pretty much, doctors tell me that it happens too infrequently to be a symptom of something, that it's more like an attack.  It's always in the fall, but no, sometimes in October, sometimes in September, but no set patterns.

I do notice that people seem to get a few more colds in September, but the seasons are changing then too, so perhaps the start of school is just correlation, not causation.

[elsie]

I always figured that the cold/URV of the beginning of the semester comes from the students bringing their viruses back to campus, since their germ hygeine isn't the best.

[spork]

Unless you have been seeing some sort of specialist who has thoroughly exhausted potential organic problems, I would get a second opinion. While there might be a connection to an anxiety attack, an anxiety attack does not cause intestinal volvulus.