Chills

Are you talking about rigors @Hutan ?

Sometimes I get cold quite easily and need a hot bath to warm up and wear lots of fleece and keep my house at 27°C. After the swine flu epidemic, if I got cold e.g. by going out in my garden this used to trigger head colds but that got better over about 7 years and it was during that time I found out that 27°C was the critical temperature for me to avoid these recurring headcolds.

But I also get rigors when a bad patch is coming on, which is kind of next level chills, where I am not all that physically cold but I feel as though I have zero body heat and shiver uncontrollably and my muscles are in spasm and I have to curl up and get super warm ASAP. If it happens when I am walking I am doubled over and barely able to walk in a kind of crouch. It is such a sense of absolute cold that it feels like it must be a neurological pathology of some kind.

Recently I had a bad patch last week and experienced rigors as well as 'emotional lability' off the chart, which was the search term which lead me to this thread. I woke up in the middle of the night with rigors, under blankets, in my small well insulated bedroom with a big radiator and thermostat set for 27°C. So it was not the outside temperature, it was my hypothalamus going bonkers causing the rigors.

I think they are linked, rigors and emotional lability, because they both involve the midbrain and as we have been discussing in other threads there is evidence that blood flow is lower in the midbrain for PWME.

https://www.s4me.info/threads/limbi...igue-syndrome-me-cfs-2021-xia-li-et-al.23110/

 

I think we definitely need to know more about temperate issues in ME.

I suspect both my temperature regulation and temperature sensation/awareness are off. I used to be able to cope with extremes of temperature, I have even been swimming amongst sea ice in Antarctica, but now either extreme of temperature can trigger PEM. Also I now need thermometers at times to identify how hot or cold my home is.

I don’t normally get cold hands or feet, but now do get chills and over heating in my core, particularly the thorax: hot flushes and sweating bouts, primarily while sleeping, are associated both with PEM and adverse reactions to foodstuffs I am intolerant of.

When I get cold now it can take hours to warm up. Episodes of feeling very cold, not explainable by external temperature, ie chills, tend to occur in the morning after unrefreshing sleep to need rest to recover from having been asleep. It is not uncommon when I wake up feeling more tired than when I went to sleep. In such circumstances I will get up briefly to anything necessary, eg to bring the milk in or feed the cat when she was still alive, but then need to rest in bed for several hours before establishing what activity might be possible that day. After this brief activity I will feel very cold, and need several hours, two or three, wrapped well in bed in a warm room, before I feel right again.

 

I have had chills as part of my PEM, I see it as an autonomic problem regulating body temperature. I have no central heating and at one stage of my illness, in relapse, one night, I felt I was getting to a stage of hypothermia, room temp was likely to be about 10. I had full body chills and a sense of panic and strong adrenal drive to move. I had no psychological trigger for it. It resolved when I got a hottie and put the heater on and warmed up. Took ages and ruined my sleep for night. I resolved never to have this again. Since then I heat my bedroom which is also now my day room with my recliner. Change of seasons is hard as temps fluctuate wildly in my home due to climate but especially as the temp changes in the afternoon. I still get the sense of this every day, I usually wear a beanie and have one close, even in bed. I have a hottie at hand too, I need one to sleep and nap during day. Probably my peripheral circulation is abit munted from smoking in my earlier years so may contribute to problems regulating vasodilation and constriction.