well, when I get really tired of them, I bite them off, but I am sure that somebody will say that's a really bad idea. I have one right now too, but this is only day 2

Well, my story is sort of complicated. I had a horrible case of influenza and pneumonia back in l995. Then I was on antibiotics for 2 months. I don't know if the antibiotics did me in, or it was the flu/pneumonia, but shortly after that, I developed fibromyalgia and also started going through menopause. I also developed irritable bowel syndrome, GERD and sleep apnea. Its hard to sort it all out, but something seems to cause all of this stuff in me. Are you bowels acting the same? Do you suddenly feel extremely full after eating? Are you on any other meds? When my GI problems were their worst, I was put on a PPI (proton pump inhibitor). That helped the symptoms for awhile. Pepsid (an H2 blocker) does absolutely nothing for me, so you might ask your doc for a prescription for a PPI......oh wait....I think prilosec is otc now. You could buy that and try it. Don't lose hope yet. This might just be a temporary thing you're going through. There is a Ph.D. guy who was on the GERD forum for awhile who wrote a book on how carbohydrates cause alot of GI problems. He believes our systems aren't designed to eat all these carbs and they can't be digested quickly and they ferment, and that causes alot of gas/reflux, etc. So I think you'd do well to lower your carb consumption. The stress echo I had went like this: You go in, and they put you on a heart monitor, and then you get on a treadmill, and they slowly increase the speed and incline, until you reach your target heartrate. Then you immediately lay down and they do an echocardiogram on your heart. It doesn't hurt at all. If they want you to have a nuclear med stress echo, then you will have to have a contrast medium injected into your vein.......but most stress echoes are the first type I talked about. It shows if all your heart muscle and valves are working right. what kind of doctor are you seeing? Once they rule out a heart problem (which I'm sure they will), then I would suggest seeing a good gastroenterologist. I think for some of us, as we age, our parts just don't work as well, and we can't abuse them like we used to. I know that my GI tract does fine, until I start eating too much, and then it starts to fail. You might be able to take care of this problem, just by changing your eating habits. I know how hard that can be! I've struggled with it my whole life. Its much better for me than it used to be, but I think that's because my hormones finally settled down. Men have hormones too, and sometimes they get wacky. I actually think my strange chest sensations are a combination of my GERD and my IBS.

I'm really glad your kitty is feeling better. Just to clarify though. Bartonella is a bacterium, not a virus. As such, it can be treated with antibiotics - you would not use antibiotics on a viral infection. I believe that there is still debate regarding whether Bartonella causes diseases such as stomatitis or not. It is hard to determine cause and effect, because many (most?) cats carry the Bartonella organism, so the positive finding is really not diagnostic.

My neck skin (and elsewhere) has also become very tender/itchy, albeit more than 10 years post-menopause. I prematurely aged due to lots of computer-EMF exposure, so my menopause was perhaps in my early 40s. And lots of symptoms are probably due to my life of stress & computer EMFs. I, too, developed hairs and bumps (though not such clusters), and many of them KILL me, or are itchy. My doctor had claimed they're "skin tags", ...but perhaps what I have is really milia? Note that my hairs do not grow near my bumps. They're near my chin. And my skin tags are under my chin, at sides of neck, and below my underarm hair. I have also developed brown age spots in various places, odd spider veins, and odd discolorations (akin to black and blue marks). All of them age-related. How I pray for stem cells and genuine healing systems.