For the last few years I've been dealing with what my neurologist has called Cramp Fascination Syndrome in the left side of my body. Starting earlier than that, I have been dealing with Idiopathic Transient Aphasia. All my life, I have also dealt with what I can best describe as panic attacks.
I've been able to manage until recently. There would be times of more degraded ability, but for the most part it was a thing that came and went. I'd bounce back and be able to live as normal. But this past weekend I have started to notice something: My left arm has really lost muscle tone and strength, particularly in my forearm. I noticed it first when I was driving. If I had only my left hand on the wheel as I came to a stop, either a stop sign or a red light, as the forces of inertia kept me moving forward while the vehicle stopped, that arm would not be able to resist the mild forces and would begin to shake and ache like crazy.
It became more apparent at an event we took Jr to, where I helped operate a small rope bridge exercise for the boys for a bit. All I really did was grab the two upper ropes and pull them together and downward for the smaller boys to be able to reach them. But in doing this, the shaking and aches would reappear, but only in the left arm.
Yeah, I'm right-handed, and my right side is more toned than my left, but I have always been seen as the strongest person around and have had almost no issue with any task handed to me. The disparity between my arms wasn't enough to limit me or cause concern until now.
I'm not medically trained in any way beyond basic first aid, so my own self-diagnosis is not likely anywhere within accurate. But with that in mind, most doctors are surprised at how much I know and how close I can get to a diagnosis on my own. Because of that, I have been able to identify two possible conditions that account for all of this:
First, there's Multiple Sclerosis. I have had several tests to determine if that's what it is, and the doctors who have done the test have said "no, this isn't MS." But yet, the more I have read about it, and having one doctor suggest it might be MS, I am thinking that it's not been excluded from a possibility. In all that I have read, I've learned that there's no specific shaped hole that the person has to fit through for it to be quantified as MS; it's a complex disease and has a lot of variability between people who have it.
Second, there's Spinal Muscular Atrophy, or SMA. This is much more serious than MS, but can be managed to live a full life. I am less convinced that this is what it is though, as there aren't enough connections between my symptoms and it.
And finally, there's Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease. this is the most concerning but also seems to be coming more into view as a likely thing. Some of the symptoms include muscle atrophy and problems swallowing. I definitely have muscle atrophy in my left arm and hand, and it's been quantified by my neurologist. But this increase in atrophy has me more concerned. As far as the swallowing issues, I have always dealt with a random choking sensation when I try to swallow my saliva. It doesn't usually last very long, but it does happen frequently.
I'm pretty freaked out at the possibility of it being ALS or SMA, but I can probably manage if it is MS. The more I've read about MS anyhow, I've come to think it's probably the same as Jed Bartlett's MS, relapsing/remitting, given that I have periods of feeling perfectly normal and healthy, punctuated by periods of pain and struggle around all my symptoms.
I'll try to keep this updated with the most current description of what's going on and what doctors think it is as I learn more.
Tonic - Open Up Your Eyes
I had a dream one night several years ago that makes this song so much more intense for me to listen to ever since.
I was backstage at an outdoor concert. The crowd was packed. The ring of the electric guitar began, and the crowd went crazy.
I approached the microphone on stage as the ring reached its peak and the rest of the band played the intro. I had thought the crowd was going crazy before, but somehow they found the energy to take it up 5 levels.
The intro was approaching the end and I grabbed the microphone, and just as I got the "ch-" sound out for the opening line, the crowd was still finding new levels to reach.
Then I woke up.
This might seem like a pretty vague description of the dream, but it's really hard for me to paint the picture with words. It was such a vivid dream, and I can remember all the feelings I experienced during it. I was nervous, but excited. I was confident. I walked up to that microphone stand so confidently, you'd think that it owed me money. It was such a wonderful feeling. The crowd's energy fed me. The band's energy fed me. I was full-on experiencing it.
If you think about it, along with the lyrics, you'll see the irony of it too.
Open up your eyes
Don't let your mind tell the story here
My mind was telling the story.
I don't know what it means for my life, at the time of the dream (over a decade ago) or for right now. Am I supposed to explore a singing career? I don't think I'm that talented of a vocalist. Also, who wants someone with a deep bass voice singing lead for a song like this?
When I listen to the song now, it brings a lot of those feelings out, and it's a fun ride.
At any rate, I thought I would log this for my own posterity, but also to let y'all in on how meaningful this is to me.
For years (more than 20) I have been doing things the long way with PHP. One of the examples of this is processing files and putting the results in an array (or object) to serve as key/value pairs.
Consider the following:
Foo: bar
Baz: biz
Here's some content...
If you wanted to match these lines in a way that you only get the Foo: bar
and Baz: biz
into a key/value pair, you would need to somehow match those values into a variable. Something like this would work:
<?php
preg_match_all('/^(.*?): (.*?)$/m', file_get_contents($filename), $matches);
But this will give you something like this: Array ( [0] => Array ( [0] => Foo: bar [1] => Baz: biz )
[1] => Array
(
[0] => Foo
[1] => Baz
)
[2] => Array
(
[0] => bar
[1] => biz
)
)
But what if you want to have the matched group [1]
be the keys, and matched group [2]
be the values? A for loop would accomplish it, as would other array-walking techniques.
It's far easier than that, though!
<?php
preg_match_all('/^(.*?): (.*?)$/m', file_get_contents($filename), $matches);
$keyvaluepairs = array_combine($matches[1], $matches[2]);
If you print_r()
that resultant variable, you'll find that it's exactly what you want:
Array
(
[Foo] => bar
[Baz] => biz
)
That's all I wanted to share. I hope it benefits you.
As I've mentioned before, I have been dealing with a weird nervous system issue for most of my life, but getting worse in the last 3 years.
Last September, I had an EMG, which is short for ElectroMyoGram. It's a procedure in which neurologists can evaluate nerve health and (hopefully) form a diagnosis. In this procedure, based on my experience, a technician will apply sticky electrodes to your skin, much like a TENS unit. Then, they will use some sort of a probe that is connected to the same system those electrodes are. Gradually increasing the current, they will apply a shock and read how quickly it travels up the nerve and how much attenuation (signal loss) there is. After that, a doctor will come in and do almost the same thing, but this time the probe is replaced by a needle that is inserted into the flesh at the site of the nerve. They will then apply a small current to it, much like the technician did, but will move around until they have found the nerve. In order to verify that they found the nerve, they might watch a monitor or listen to the signal in an amplified audio form. Once the signal has been found, the doctor will instruct you to activate the muscle in a certain way, and will read the signals that come naturally. The results of all of this poking and shocking are recorded in a digital form, and will be sent to the doctor who ordered the test.
In my case, at least today, the shocking phase wasn't too bad. What was unpleasant was when the doctor had me activate the muscles with a needle in the nerve. I remember that being unpleasant last time, but this time it was more than unpleasant. In addition to the basics of that part of the test, the doctor also worked hard to trigger a cramp in my foot so she could read what was going on. I remember last time I was uncomfortable after, but this time It was almost enough to keep me from driving home.
When I got home I took some medicine to try and calm the pain down, and it's done a good job of that. However, my ability to focus and problem solve is gone, and I'm ready to fall asleep. Back to that lyric I quoted before: the medication just numbs the brain.
The doctor today seemed very happy with the results. Not necessarily in the sense that it was a good report, but that it was a very useful report. I'm hoping so, because I don't really want to have to go through another test like that any time soon.
In the recent decade, the internet has moved away from written articles with figures and whatnot in them, in favor of things like YouTube videos. This cultural change has spread beyond YouTube and the public internet, though, and even includes major corporations, including the one I work for.
What I've found is that I am unable to really process anything that's presented in a video.
I am a decent reader, and over the last couple of decades or so, I've been able to cultivate a form of speed reading, which I use almost always. This allows me to take in loads of information rather quickly, not constrained to the limits of my ability to process spoken word, or another's ability to speak it. But when I am presented with either recommendations to watch a YouTube video to learn how to configure a piece of flight simulator software, or when I am issued mandatory education at work in the form of a video, I get incredibly frustrated, and I find that I'm unable to retain whatever it is that I observe.
When it comes to important things, where a certain set of steps must be followed precisely, or when it's a thing that I am required to do, PLEASE, I beg of you, don't throw a video at me.