Twitching

Last night I was so tired that there was something twitching in my forehead. It felt really weird. It was right above my nose, near my right eyebrow.

I need sleep. When I was in graduate school, I didn't sleep very much. Right after graduate school, I ended up getting pretty sick. With a weird, rare, and often very serious disorder. I was lucky. My case was very mild. I only had paresthesias. Fun word. It means numbness, prickly, weird sensations. Basically, when I was "sick," I was exhausted, and numb from the chest down. Really numb. It also felt like I was wearing a corset. My hands were numb too.

I recovered completely except my hands are still numb all the time. When I'm tired, I get really uncoordinated and sometimes "twitchy". Last night at dance, doing a turn, I almost fell, but I caught myself. When I start to feel klutzy I know I have to sleep. I try to sleep a lot in general. I don't actually like having to sleep so much. It makes me feel like I'm missing out on doing other things, but I don't like how I feel when I don't sleep enough.

They aren't sure what caused my case. Idiopathic, but most likely triggered by a virus is what they say. I had just had several vaccinations for a trip, and then I caught a cold. Most likely the vaccines revved my immune system and then the cold trigged the autoimmune attack. Even though I was lucky, with a mild case, it is still scary. When it's a mild case, they can't tell for sure whether it's TM (transverse myelitis), or MS (multiple sclerosis). They tell you to wait 3 or 4 years, sleep a lot and try to stay healthy. If it's MS, it'll come back, if it's just TM you'll be fine.

It's been almost 9 years. I'm still good. Whenever I get really tired, I start to think that perhaps it's recurring because I get klutzy, and because my hands get more numb. I also get this "shooting electrical pain" that goes down my back, legs and out my toes when I move my head a certain way. All of this is normal (for me). I have a demyelinated area on my spine. That means the nerves can't talk to each other and thus, the weird symptoms. Oh, and if I get hot, forget it! In the summer, when it hits 90, I just kind of melt. My hands get really really numb and I feel more numb kind of everywhere. Oh, and then there is the allodynia. That's when a light touch really hurts. I used to have to wear padded fingertip things when I typed because it hurt my fingers a lot. Now it hurts just a bit, but I don't wear the little pads.

Anyway, I'm not complaining. I do feel lucky. I just wanted to share with you one of the myriad of reasons that sleep is so important to me. I didn't want you to think I just liked to whine about lack of sleep. I also wanted you to know so you could know why vaccines are so scary to me when I give them to my girls. And why I do them slowly. And why I don't do ones that don't seem "necessary" to me. The world used to be much more black and white to me, but I have learned a lot about grey.