Hi,
I posted something related to this tumor in another discussion. I don't think I have hypertension, but according to my doctor, the release of high amounts of adrenaline does suggest that I may have the tumor you mention. My level of adrenaline (specifically, nerophrine) is quite high: 1200!
Some facts that I have noticed:
1. When it is hot and I have walked a couple of blocks, I feel a kind of heat similar to the one I feel when I get mad, excited, or ashamed. The doctor (I'm from Chile) asked me "¿Te sientes abochornado cuando te da calor?" which means "Do feel as if you were very ashamed of youself when you get hot?" I told him that that was just what happened to me, and that I had thought it was stress or anxiety, so I was doing yoga and meditation and sport, but during the last few months I have been experiencing a constant feeling of shamefulness.
I remember once, 4 years ago, I had an anxiety attack, and I felt so hot that I broke in a sweat. My ex-girlfriend had tsent me an email saying that she had cheated on me. Nowadays, I feel that kind of heat most of the time, which is like shamefulness, impotence and anger all mixed up. I honestly didn't think that there could be a relation between this heat and HH heat, even though the heat from my body, notwithstanding the cause, always seems to come from my chest, and from then up to my head and down to my feet.
I won't deny that though I have had this condition during a long time, I just thought that some people were born like this, and didn't feel it was that bad. I like reading and talking, so I don't move a lot and so, I don't sweat a lot. However, just a couple of months ago I noticed my head, specifically my skull, was getting full of pimples. I went to a dermatologist who gave me a special shampoo, which didn't help at all. Summer was just starting, and I was beginning to sweat a lot from my forehead and skull. I told my doctor that I thought that could be the reason of the pimples, and she said that it wasn't and that the shampoo was all I needed. After two months, it didn't work. I decided to visit another dermatologist (in this forum I have learned always to get a second opinion and also to be patient with doctors who don’t know about HH), and he said that sweating could be the cause.
This guy was very cool. He gave me a prescription to order Avert right away when I discover it here in this forum. I have tried the pills myself, and I think that they are cool; though I do not like to use them very much, and they don't seem to work completely if I get just a little ashamed or mad.
Yet, weirdly, they do diminish the body heat. When I take Avert, I don’t feel hot, and this feeling lasts two complete days, even though I may sweat. Anyway, my second dermatologist told me that he didn't know about HH (he was a very honest doctor), and he talked with another doctor, an older one, who started taking care of my case. It was this last doctor (after six months of visits) who asked me to take the cathecolamines (I think Jezza has the spelling right in the other discussion) test. The doctor also discovered that my body's response to sugar was very slow. I read somewhere that it may also be a symptom of the tumor.
Another strange fact is that I usually get mad, but don't show it. When I do that, I get very hot, and that triggers profuse sweating.
Conclusion:
I don't really know if I really want a tumor in me. I don't know if I want to undergo surgery. I am really afraid because my grandmother lost her capacity to talk in a surgery. It is true that she was 71 and I'm 26, but anyway, I would not like to wake up not being able to talk anymore; I prefer HH than losing speech. I know it may be a silly fear, but I guess that we all have our fears, and to determine which ones are silly and which ones aren't is something subjective.
And yet, it is nice to think that maybe there is a cure for HH.
Hope this may help somebody. I have received a lot of wisdom from this forum, specially from Nexus and MargieHope (and others), who have been willing to post their experiences and share with others.
Cheers!
100years
By the way, I love translation, and the other day I was reading a book by a British translation scholar, Susan Bassnett, where she mentions a translation of an Arab play into English. This was circa 1700's. In the original play, there is a girl who sweats a lot. She is the heroine and the sweat makes her glow. The sweat also reveals that she is a healthy woman. The translator decided to eliminate the sweat, as he deemed it "unappropiate". Conclusion: I think that the reaction toward sweat is the real disease, and that part of our labor is to talk about our condition so that people in the future know about it and accept it and, more importantly, see that their reaction towards excessive sweating, when it is a bad one, is in itself the real problem.
