Hi stargazer, since you have battled with oxalate problems I wanted to ask have you had any neck problems like cracking, popping or crunching noises or anything like that?One of the strangest things about my body is that I seem to need excessive amounts of calcium. I have some hypotheses as to why which I will get to.
But, what I have noticed is that all calcium antagonists make me very ill if I'm not getting exorbitant amounts of calcium to go along with them. Vitamin K2 and magnesium both make me sick without large amounts of calcium. I remember taking vitamin K2 a few years ago without much calcium and I felt like I had severe low blood pressure and felt very weak, couldn't get out of bed. I developed severe pain in the center of my back and it felt like bone pain.
Magnesium makes me extremely fatigued if I take it in the morning or afternoon. However, if I take it at night, I feel wired all night and can't sleep. I can only tolerate about 500 mg of magnesium per 2000-2500mg of calcium consumed per day. Anything more makes me feel similar to how vitamin K2 makes me feel.
One of the signs of hypocalcemia is parasthesia. In parasthesia, you essentially lose circulation and nerve function in a peripheral tissue, most commonly the finger tips or toes. It can last for quite a while until it randomly reverses itself. When I was eating a lower calcium diet (on the order of 400 mg per day max), I would get these parasthesias frequently.
Another symptom I experience on low calcium diets or with calcium antagonists is the visual migraine. In a visual migraine, a lightning bolt shape appears in the middle of your field of vision and begins to spread out and become larger as it takes up more of your field of vision. The first time it happened I freaked out thinking I was going blind. It lasts 20-30 minutes and then disappears.
I am also intolerant to vitamin A which can act as a calcium antagonist in some contexts, but that is a much more complicated story that involves a course of accutane when I was 15 and a vitamin A overdose from a few years ago which have forced me to eat a near zero-vitamin A diet for several years now.
All of the above symptoms are completely eliminated by getting large amounts of calcium, at least 1000mg per day but I feel best on 2000-2500mg per day (mostly from milk).
As to my hypotheses explaining why I need so much calcium. my body makes about 3 times the amount of oxalate that an average person does which predisposes me to kidney stones (I passed a kidney stone at the age of 23). Oxalate binds to calcium, rendering it unavailable for use by the body. Therefore, I think I need very large amounts of calcium to overcome the amount of lost calcium due to oxalate binding.