Subject: For those of you who don’t know, I have Tourettes
Date: Tuesday 6/6/06 2:50:00 AM
Mood: Fidgety
Tags: edit me, private, tag me
For those of you who don’t know, I have Tourettes (as well as ADHD and OCD).
I was diagnosed when I was Six, went to the Mayo Clinic (it wasn’t well known back then) spent numerous years on various loads of medication, joined the local chapter of the TSA…never went to meetings, watching other people tic sets me off, went through most of my education as a Special Ed student (soon to be poly-lingual, college graduate, who’s appeared in Time Magazine and the Washington Post, among others) and no, before you ask I don’t have the ‘cursing tic’ or Coprolalia (the medical definition); the Buffalo News actually had me as one of a few people in a special interest story about special education students who are in college; if you’re interested I can dig up the URL somewhere.
Over the years as I’ve come off all of the medication I was put on (I’ve been medication free of all kinds for well over a year; I came off Paxil my Sophomore year of college cold turkey…which I later found out you aren’t supposed to do…but I didn’t have any adverse affects so…yay…I guess, and I came off of Risperidone on my own last summer…and then told my Psychiatrist (it’s nice to be able to regularly surprise someone) who was like “wow…well done then”
Anyways, what works for me is just mostly meditation, avoiding sitting close in the movies, or going to them at all (the flash rate for some reason really sets me off) coaching for situations I’m going to go into and most of the time people just think I have a head cold (because during the winter my tics get worse and I cough often…and I make some nose noises all year round) so you really wouldn’t know unless I told you.
When I had to explain to Vince (when we were sleeping together nightly) that when I wiggled it didn’t mean I wanted him to let go, rather I wanted him to hold tighter it was actually far less awkward than I thought it was going to be (things you don’t think about until they happen) so that was pretty cool…I was just basically like “I have tourettes…and ADHD…I fidget, wiggle and move…just hold on.”
However, some days are much harder than others and for some reason I am all KINDS of Fidgety today which I think is because I’ve been going non-stop now for two weeks with very little personal time to unwind, reorder my thoughts and all and it’s probably just taking it’s toll…fortunately for me the only thing I have to do today is go to the Bank and Mail out a check and do laundry…so I can sleep in and just have some me time…and get everything back into the order it normally is in.
Anyways, fun fact you may not have known about me =D it’s made life much more interesting and really, there’s nothing like ADHD to multi-task and multi-task well…and really, it’s fun…I don’t think of it so much as a disorder or a syndrome…more of life’s little quirks.
That said, it’s bed time.
G’night =D
~ me…fidgeting…
moocowinthecity