Apraxia

I have not been posting because my brain has not been working. I was exposed to the Corona Virus in the beginning of March. I have not had a Corona Virus test because I did not need expose myself to the  concentration of sick people at any medical facility when I was already vulnerable. And I have not had any problems with my lungs that would drive me to find emergency respiratory care.

But I have had severe aggravation of all my chronic health issues since mid-March. Specifically, I have had so much inflammation and swelling in my CNS (central nervous system) that I cringe at sudden noises and spoken words, no matter how well meant, batter meaninglessly at my ears. Sequestering has not been a problem as interaction with people has been overwhelming and incapacitating.

But that is not entirely outside my usual array of chronic health issues. I have a long and varied history of chronic pain and head trauma but I have been hyper-hyper-sensitive to e-mag since I got hit by lightning in 2014. So episodes of aggravation in my CNS are not unusual. When inflamed, my nervous system all too readily and indiscriminately shunts input into pain circuitry, which is not an enviable type of synesthesia. 

I had gotten a full body out-of the-system ultrasound last fall intended to screen for health problems. It is inexpensive as medical tests go and I wanted an overall sense of what my body was doing. While the tech was working, I mentioned that I had some seriously weird stuff going on in my head, including leaking bloody serum out my face along my trigeminal nerves, and it was too bad he did not do cranial ultrasounds.

He said that they did not advertise cranial ultrasounds but he would be glad to do one for me. Sending Doppler sound waves through my right temple did not show anything out of the norm, but the left side showed an AV malformation in the lower left posterior part of the Circle of Willis. On the Doppler ultrasound, the AVM looked like a pile of blinking Christmas tree lights.

My AV malformation is a tiny tangle of veins and arteries that connect directly to each other instead of through a capillary bed interrupting the flow of blood to my brain The Circle of Willis is a circle of blood vessels just below the base of the brain right along where all the cranial nerves originate.. At best, this AVM interferes with the blood flow to the brain. At worst, the blood vessels burst and bleed into places where the fluid has nowhere to go.

And that explained a lifetime’s worth of inexplicably weird and debilitating neurological symptoms. One side affect of AV malformations near the brain is apraxia, which is problems with comprehending, integrating and organizing information in order to make plans and then act on them. Even when I can understand what is being said, my ability to process and respond to those words has been compromised.

Getting that information into the main-stream medical system meant I had to persuade a primary care doctor to refer me to a brain specialist and that meant I needed to get an MRA to get an acceptable image of the circulatory structures in my head. Getting a blast of electro-magnetic energy only a couple of weeks after getting the trans-cranial ultra-sound seriously aggravated the already existing inflammation in my CNS.

Usually I can moderate my sensitivity enough to take care of essentials What is different than usual of late is my inability to perceive either the trigger or find any path to calming down the inflammation. With the inflammation from the Corona Virus, my brain is so reactive that there are times that I cannot impute meaning to what I see and hear.

Stress of any kind aggravates both my e-mag issues and my apraxia. If I am startled by sounds and frustrated by my inability to communicate, I short out my cell phone and freeze my computer. I do find myself wondering if the severity of my CNS symptoms is related to my e-mag trauma and hypersensitivity.

Arthur Firstenberg’s book ‘The Invisible Rainbow, A History of Electricity and Life’ is a well-documented fascinating read. Electrical sensitivity and illness has been affecting people since electricity became a fad in the 1860’s and is real now.

But keeping calm is actually my best medicine, even if it offends all my apocalyptic conspiracy theory friends.