As a brief note today, when I got really sick in the years 2014-2017, I used to tell my doctors that I feel like I’ve been poisoned. As I learned more, I’d tell them that it felt like toxic shock syndrome, anaphylactic shock (anaphylaxis), or sepsis, because it felt like I was about to go unconscious (pass out, also known as syncope). Indeed, I did lose consciousness seven times.
They all looked at me like I was crazy when I told them these things, but it turns out I was right: I have a rare blood disease named Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, or MCAS. It’s a disease of your body’s mast cells, which are a type of white blood cell. If you have MCAS you essentially have been poisoned, because your body’s white blood cells are reacting to something in the environment — something you ate, drank, smelled, touched, breathed.
If you feel like you have symptoms like these I encourage you to learn more about MCAS, either by following the first link to Wikipedia, or by following this link to my blog posts about MCAS.
