u/Previous_Argument653

For context I (29F) had a good date with a guy about a year older than me on Saturday. It was pretty lowkey just coffee and a walk but I liked him a lot and felt like we had an interesting conversation. He seemed nervous at first but definitely relaxed as the date went on and I was getting a few positive signs, he commented a few times that he liked x, y, z thing about me and they were things to do with my approach and outlook not my appearance. Not necessarily a flirty vibe which I just put down to first date nerves (I’m terrible at flirting anyway!).

After about 3 hours of chatting I asked what he wanted to do and he said he was going to head off. I felt this was a bit abrupt in the moment but realised afterwards that we had been talking for a while without any lull in conversation. We hugged and said it was nice to meet each other but there was no talk of a second date.

Later that evening I thanked him for coming to see me (he drove about an hour) and said I’d enjoyed our conversation and hoped he enjoyed the rest of the weekend. I didn’t mention a second date as I kind of wanted that to come from him and usually when I send a message like that it’s enough for the guy to then get the message and ask me out again. He replied the same evening reflecting back what I said to him, he enjoyed meeting me and thanked me for my company and then hoped I enjoyed the weekend. I can’t figure out if that was a polite way of shutting the door or if he was just ‘matching my energy’ so to speak and wasn’t sure if I was interested in a second date.

I haven’t heard from him since then and don’t know what to make of it. Before our date we were messaging pretty steadily for a couple of weeks, 1 message per day with a few days gap in between sometimes (the gaps were on my side because I had a lot going on and don’t like to have constant messaging before meeting someone). We both said we’re not really texters and prefer in person connection, but I would have hoped to have heard from him by now. I did see he was online on the dating app we met on so clearly he’s on his phone… He also travels a lot for work and sounds like he has quite an intense job. He also initiated the first date, he asked me last minute if I was free for a dinner thing the next day when I had other plans but I said I would still like to meet and so he then suggested the day/time that we ended up meeting.

So help me: is this a normal, slow burn kind of pause after a first date while he collects his thoughts, is he busy and trying to match my energy, does he need a stronger green light from me to set up a second date or is he just not interested? I haven’t felt a connection to someone like this in a while so I guess I’m more invested with this than other dates I’ve been on, and of course this is the one where I don’t hear from him afterwards 😂 I don’t want to appear needy or desperate by messaging again but I also don’t want to look back and think I left things unsaid and therefore don’t know what could have been. My natural instinct is to reach out again just to make sure, but I’ve done that in the past and usually find that if I have to be the one to reach out, he’s probably not interested. It’s whether I give him a few more days before reaching out as well incase he is busy with work. I also have a lot of noise in my head about what you ‘should’ do as a woman in dating from all the rubbish you hear online, which gets in the way of me just being true to myself a lot of the time. I got the vibe that he liked the idiosyncratic and authentic aspects of me, so does it then follow that being myself and following my instincts is the best way to go? But then I’m still single so maybe there’s something to it! Any advice appreciated (especially from men as I never know what you lot actually want!) x

Not sure if this is the right place for this but I’m sort of spiralling after my herpes swab came back inconclusive today.

Went to the sexual health clinic on Monday (in the UK) and she swabbed my super painful open sore on my vagina. She said it doesn’t look like how herpes usually presents and she also said she’d never seen blisters / sores on the nipples (which I have). For some reason she only tested for herpes on the swab (but there wasn’t enough liquid on it apparently!!) and HIV and syphillis in the blood which both came back negative.

I’m on my period now too and can’t go back to the clinic until Tuesday when I’ll be swabbed again and they’ll do a full STI panel (not sure why this wasn’t done originally). I’m just concerned because I was pretty sure it was herpes (which is bad enough) but the nurse thinks it could be something else but doesn’t know what. She was even asking today where the guy I had sex is from and if he’s been out of the UK recently, as if I have some strange unidentified virus?? Hopefully she’s just a bad nurse and doesn’t know what she’s talking about….

Can anyone help? My symptoms are:
- super painful large open sore at the bottom of my vagina opening which doesn’t seem to be healing
- swollen and painful premium
- itchy and painful anus (pooping is incredibly painful as is sitting down)
- nerve pain in my labia and down the back of my thighs / legs into my feet
- a couple of pus filled blisters on each nipple which don’t seem to be healing

No other flu like symptoms or anything. Started itching / burning and some irritation around the nipples and vagina the day after having sex with a new partner that then developed into the blisters and sores and nerve pain a few days later. The guy I slept with said he’s never had herpes but he used to get cold sores on his mouth a few years ago and has had a couple of sexual partners since his last test…. They don’t seem to test for herpes anyway!

Should I be worried that this is something unidentifiable or can I just settle for it being herpes?

TLDR: how to get an urgent MRI referral when the doctor who said I needed it has bungled the paperwork and emergency departments won’t give them?

On Thursday I had an urgent appointment with an ophthalmologist after a headache that started 3 weeks ago hadn’t gone away. This is after several months of building pressure behind my eyes, pain when moving my eyes, and unusual sensitivity to light. I’ve always had drusen in my optic nerve but his OCT scans now show the optic nerve is swollen and I’ve lost peripheral vision and there’s no spontaneous venous pulse in my optic nerve. He was concerned and said I needed an MRI, but he said the wait time would be long and “we’re loosing time”. He asked me if I would go to the emergency eye until at a different hospital on the same day to get an MRI. I said if he thought it was necessary then I would go. He wrote a letter which he sealed in an envelope and told me to give to the emergency eye clinic.

I arrive at the eye clinic and they have no idea who I am, take the letter off me and disappear for a few hours (it’s chaos in there!). I’m eventually seen by a nurse who triages me and does basic reading tests and puts dilating drops in my eyes (which I’d already had that morning). 6 hours later I’m seen by a doctor who, without even asking for my symptoms, tells me there’s nothing wrong with my eyes because I haven’t lost vision and I need to go home. I ask her to read the letter from the ophthalmologist, which she scans in about 10 seconds and disagrees with everything he’d written and said that visual field loss and lack of veinous pulse aren’t a thing. I hadn’t read the letter until this point but I read it and saw that the ophthalmologist didn’t even say in the letter that he’s recommending an MRI, and he said ‘the patient wishes to be reassessed at the emergency the clinic’ as if it was my idea? The emergency doctor said urgent MRIs are only given for suspected strokes which clearly I didn’t have. And she couldn’t see the results of the OCT scans done that morning showing the swollen optic nerve and couldn’t repeat the OCT scans because it was now out of hours (I arrived at the clinic at 1:30pm). So she’s booked me in for OCT scans on Monday…. She also thinks it’s nothing to do with my eyes and it’s actually multiple sclerosis given my age / demographic and other symptoms.

Yesterday I called the ophthalmologists secretary to get some clarity but she said he was off. She put the issue to the nurses in the eye clinic who agreed with the emergency doctor that the letter doesn’t say anything about needing an MRI, but she would follow up with the doctor next week. I called my GP to tell them what had happened and they were confused and said it was clear from the ophthalmologists letter that I needed an MRI (even though he doesn’t explicitly say ‘needs an MRI). She called the emergency same day care unit at the same hospital I’d already been dismissed from who agreed. She told me that I had been booked in for an MRI scan at 4:15, so I presumed I would walk in and have a scan and that would be that. I arrive at the unit and they at least were expecting me this time but when I spoke to the doctor she had no idea why I’d been referred or what was going on. I explained the whole thing including the letter from the ophthalmologist and said that urgent MRI scans can’t happen unless you’re suspected to be having a stroke… she gave me a CT scan which took 5 hours but came back clear (as expected) but told me that she does think something is wrong with my eyes and that I should go back for the OCT scans on Monday.

So I’ve spent 12 hours in two different emergency departments after being referred there only to be told that the test I apparently urgently need cannot even be performed urgently? Why would the ophthalmologist send me for an urgent MRI without mentioning the word MRI in his referral letter? Why did he not send the tests results that had concerned him to the other hospital? Why did my GP tell me that I had been booked in for an MRI when I hadn’t? The whole thing is a shit show and now I don’t know if I do actually need an MRI, if I have an eye problem or multiple sclerosis, and I’m back to the eye unit on Monday probably to sit there for the whole day for them to tell me they still can’t give me an MRI? I can’t believe this I’m in so much pain and the system is so difficult to navigate. Im single and don’t have family in the area so I’m navigating this on my own. I’m probably just ranting more than anything else but is there anything I can do to get clarity with this? I understand the system is stretched but this seems like a waste of their own time and resources as well as mine?

I’m 4 weeks out from my Ferrinject infusion and whilst I’ve see some improvements, I’m still exhausted all the time and have brain fog, palpitations, rashes, bruising easily…. Could something else be going on, or am I just impatient with the results and it takes longer to feel better after an infusion?

I had covid in September last year and my symptoms are consistent with long covid which could be causing overactive mast cells. I’ve also had loads of random food intolerances and completely unpredictable bowel activity for my whole life, could I have a gut problem / histamine intolerance that needs proper investigation and treatment?

Anyone else had the experience of ‘fixing’ your iron levels without any improvement in symptoms and then found out something else was going on? I have a follow up GP appointment tomorrow so I’m hoping to go in with some pointers and direction for them. Haven’t re-tested ferritin and hemoglobin yet as was told the results are unreliable in the first 2-3 months after infusion…

So new neighbours moved in upstairs about 2.5 months ago and they were immediately making a racket. We barely heard the old neighbours at all other than the creaky doors would swing once or twice a day and once every couple of weeks they would have family round.

But the new couple upstairs have the doors creaking 20 times an hour, their footsteps are heavy and there are things being dropped a couple of times every hour or so that vibrates my flat downstairs.

They have woken me up several times in the night, the first week they moved in it was at 04:30 every morning and I was starting to think I would go insane but this thankfully stopped.

A few days ago they woke me up at 3am with the door creaking and stomping, so I finally wrote a note which was very calm and polite and apologised for bothering them. I asked if they could try to reduce impact noise on the floor and also use some oil on the doors to prevent creaking. I don’t think it was unreasonable. There has been no improvement since then but I was going to give them a week or so to get the oil etc. before escalating.

But last night I was woken up again, this time at 01:30 with the same creaking and banging but this time it went on for around 90 minutes before I could go back to sleep. It’s a public holiday here in the UK so I understand they would be up later but I think it’s inconsiderate to be throwing things around on the floor at 01:30 in the morning.

So I’m thinking I’ll go upstairs and talk to them face to face today. I felt too scared to do that before but now I’ve seen how inconsiderate they are I don’t really care. I won’t be rude and I won’t expect them to be very receptive to it but I have to try. I’ve been recovering from a long term illness and rest has been essential but really hard to come by in recent weeks. Is this a good plan or should I try something else?

So 3 weeks post infusion I had a blood test that showed my phosphate level is low, 0.6 when it should be 0.78+. This isn’t low enough for a phosphate supplement prescription according to my GP, however I’m still absolutely wiped out with fatigued muscles and bone/joint pain and heart palpitations. I’ve been having nothing but high phosphate foods and drinks for every meal since the infusion. Feel like I could just do with a short boost of supplements to get me back to normal and I’m frustrated that I haven’t been able to feel the benefits of the infusion yet. Has anyone in the UK had success getting phosphate supplements over the counter or have any recommendations for how to get them? Or am I doomed to keep shoving yoghurt and Coca Cola down me every day for another few weeks?