What an amazing and wonderful day! It was really nice to just be home again and relax :) Cheryl did her thing as usually for Easter dinner - I feel bad for you if you didn't manage to get a plate :)
Back at MRF rejuvenated and ready to get to work. I am more determined than ever to get home permanently. It won't be long now. The finish line is in sight.
I have a lot of people ask about my specific symptoms and what type I therapy I am receiving here at MFB. So, I want take a minute to try to illustrate for you. My problem is actually two-fold (To all my medical professional friends, please credit any technical inaccuraccies to my layman's understanding of a very complex system)
Ok so I would like you to try a little exercise. Yeah right now LOL. All you have to do is take off your socks and shoes and stand up. Good... now take a moment and focus on your feet. Consider all the information that your feet are giving you right now. They are telling you about the surface you are standing on such and the texture and relative stability. Now as you stand there notice that each leg is providing a certain amount of pressure and muscle contraction to keep you standing up right. All the way up through your body your weight shifts slightly.. almost imperceptibly to keep you from swaying left to right or back and forth. The human body has many adaptations to allow us to walk upright. It is an intricate symphony of movement and minor adjustments to compensate for the environment. To take the experiment a little further... lift one foot off of the ground. Now feel how you body adjusts your weight to balance over this new center. Amazing huh?! You aren't even thinking about this! Your body is just doing what it has to do to remain in your desired position!
Well that is where my problem lies. The part of my brain that has been affect is the area responsible for coordinating movement, balance and fine motor skills. So while there is no damage to the areas that control large muscle movement (which would have caused weakness/paralysis) it is like the air traffic controller is asleep. Or as my doctor explained it, my brain and my body have a bad cell connection.
My body is sending information to my brain and my brain is sending back intructions, but the messages are not getting through clearly. The result is that I am not able to make the numerous measurements and adjusts that are needed for things like walking. It feels to me as if the ground is unstable and I am constantly trying to adjust faulty information. Because of this I sway and mis-step as if I were drunk.
To make things a little more interesting I am also coping with second issue. Because of some damage to my optic nerve I am experiencing a twitch in my eye and slight lag at times. In order to see in three dimensions your eyes are slightly spaced to give 2 slightly different images with depth and must move in complete unison. The images are then put together in your brain to create the 3D picture we all know and love. My eyes are not tracking together which impairs my ability to accurately judge distances and causes blurriness. The twitching causes double vision in parts of my visual field.
So now I cannot trust the information from my body or from my eyes. It is only slightly off, but enough when added to my other issue to make getting around on my own pretty difficult.
This is why I am in therapy. To help my body and mind learn how to talk to each other. In therapy I look a lot like a toddler taking those first tentative steps as I learn to understand what the information my body is sending actually means. The medications that I am taking will help to treat the underlying condition and the therapy will help to strengthen the current connections in my brain as well as build new ones.
So believe me when I saw I won't be here long. This is truly a issue of mind over matter. I will learn and adapt. That's all there is to it. So I hope I didn't bore you too much and maybe explained a little bit more about what I have been going through.
Well thanks for listening. Your words of encouragement push me to do better every day. With a cheering section like this how could I ever fail?! Till next time good-night.
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