What are the symptoms that put you in bed for a day and wiped out for days?
It's hard to remember the details of what happened but the symptoms I remember best were total exhaustion to the point of needing to lie in bed and just watch video all day, having a very hard time getting up in the mornings, feeling like I had a fever (but didn't) for most of the day, weak muscles, painful muscles, my feet / lower legs feeling freezing cold, numb and like the muscles were twisting, for lack of a better term, and my forearms aching and feeling like I had carpal tunnel syndrome. I know that potassium can address many of these, but at just ~50 mcg, the need for potassium (which I prefer to address with food) quickly became overwhelming.
The symptoms in my forearms and lower legs have been going on at a low level since last Fall and I suspect that's when B-Right started using the 50 mcg methylfolate (which I was taking with C, thank god, or I'd have been totally baffled and freaked out about what was going on with me). The website says that the formula was changed in Spring of 2012, so it may have percolated down to me in the Fall, ordering it online at iherb.
With my most recent miniature dose of 25 mcg folinic (which I thought would be benign relative to methylfolate), the symptoms have been annoying but manageable with food potassium, and are changing every day since I took it. The symptoms cycle around, lasting for a variable period of time, then disappearing, and then a different one popping up. They are continuing now on the third day since taking that dose at about the same rate.
The very first symptom I got was a raspy throat. I'd thought folinic would be benign and then I noticed that my voice was hoarse, and thought,
"Oh no, it's starting again!", since I remembered that odd symptom from before. It's also a hallmark hypothyroid symptom, which is why I noticed it. My husband was sure it was just in my mind but then a few moments later all the other ones started up, starting with my mouth feeling sore and actual angular chelitis, which I haven't had in years. Folinic apparently doesn't cross the blood brain barrier but it did give me a positive mood (possibly due to the excess energy). Other symptoms are burning muscles (like when I was starting B-12), headache, the typical muscle cramping in my feet/lower legs ,etc.
Stomach cramping and feeling like I can't breathe and some of the more difficult symptoms because when they are bad I have no desire to eat anything, much less drink potassium containing drinks, but have to force myself to. The feeling of not being able to breathe I had attributed to the stomach cramping, but now I think it really is it's own thing.
Odd symptoms include very focused and specific muscle pains. One day I woke up with a single tooth really aching to the point of feeling like I must have a bad cavity and better deal with it right away, such that I called the dentist and made an appt for 7 am the next day. This went on for hours, until I had some orange juice and then realized that it was gone and likely the potassium had relieved it. Another day I woke up with the area right over my right kidney really hurting, highly focused pain, but nowhere else. I thought, I better drink a lot of water, so did, and when that made no difference, again I realized it was the methylfolate, and so had a lot of juice and banana and it went away. Another odd symptom was sore breasts. That's since gone away. B-12 never did any of this, although it had a lot of odd symptoms.
I suppose I could write a novel about my symptoms . . .
So what happened to me last weekend was that my period started and then it was like dropping a bomb in my little experiment and everything went ballistic. Someone I know described my sensory experiences as being similar to taking
Harmaline, if you've ever tried it (and my MAO A is +/+). That I can self-generate that type of experience is why I've never experimented with psychedelics and take no mind altering substances aside from wine and beer and espresso. It's too long to describe here but the most difficult component was huge waves of anxiety coming on suddenly and that went on intermittently for about 3 days. It was directly hormonally related and disappeared as soon as the bleeding lessened. I know that serotonin and estrogen both drop significantly with menstruation, so I presume that was what was going on. But it's not something I want to allow to repeat.
Anyway, so I appreciated this part of your message:
Some have had to do micro-titrations, maybe 10mcg 4x a day increasing by 10% each day.
I'm not yet ready for even that amount because each dose is additive at this point. What's worked is doing every other day, which gives me a chance to get a sense of what's going to happen. As I get more comfortable, maybe I can improve that.
This kind of increase indicates real severe folate deficiency.
Perhaps, but given that I can self-generate a sensory experience that others have to take drugs for, suggests that my perceptions may be a little distorted by my biochemistry, so experiences of my symptoms may not be a 1:1 relationship with the actual intensity of a deficiency in my case.