FND

Inspirational song: Find Her Finder (Frank Zappa)

That could have turned out much worse. The appointment with the Anschutz movement disorder clinic was this afternoon. I had Mr S-P drive me there, because I didn’t know exactly where it was, other than off towards Aurora. Turns out I have actually been there before, once, before we ever moved away from Colorado, when a woman from our greater circle of friends gave birth at what was then Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center. (I’m struggling with the realization that that baby is now like 23-24 years old. Ow.) I still am not comfortable driving on the highway, because of the very condition that I went to the doctor to discuss. I have a running declaration that being told a condition is all in my head is the worst of all possible answers. I desperately feared hearing that again today. It kind of was where he went with it, but in a totally non-dismissive way. There is no visible damage in my brain, but there is an actual physiological disorder, that has a psychiatric aspect to it. When he says it’s possible that it’s caused by stress, it is for sure a physical manifestation of that stress. There are real things to be done to address it, to heal the affected neural pathways. I don’t have to shut up and leave him alone, like doctors who weren’t interested in my younger undiagnosed lupus self wanted.

I now have a new set of initials: FND, for Functional Neurological Disorder. I have a ton of reading to do to understand it. Doctor was very good at explaining, but he got me as far as “you know how your lupus is unique and everyone experiences it differently? This is like that. You won’t have everything all the time.” They use a lot of computer metaphors with this, as in, the hardware of your brain and nervous system are still intact, but the software running on it is corrupt and needs to be rebooted. He said I’m halfway through the hard part, having done so much to self-analyze what’s happening, and to understand what soothes the problem. He also made me feel good about my research, letting me know (without me admitting that I’d googled and found the term) that what I’m suffering are indeed myoclonic jerks.

I want to read more about FND tonight, but I am not long for this plane of consciousness. I was awake until past 3 am last night, binging on the entire Netflix series about the police in my hometown in Oklahoma. It was disturbing and enlightening, and I want to watch it again. I am aware even more how differently we had it as part of the “establishment,” one of the old families of note, than our life could have been if we had been nameless poor. I’ll write about this later, after a rewatch and deep inner reflection.