Content warning: depictions of stressful situations
Imagine you're at work and you're having an okay, but not great day. You're going about your business and a colleague says something that hits a little too close to home. You know you should just ignore it, shake it off, and maybe on a better day you could. The comment wasn't directly mean or anything, and the person probably didn't mean anything by it, but it makes you just a little bit sad. You continue to work regardless, looking forward to coming home later and just relax.
As you're working you start feeling a bit sluggish and something happens to your vision. Everything looks the same, it just feels distant somehow. Perhaps a drink of water would do some good, you think and start walking to get a glass of water. But walking along in your workplace seems so alien to you now. Everything has turned into a long tunnel and the air has turned into sludge.
Somehow you manage to get to the kitchen and get a glass of water, but your barely able to grasp it. Afraid of dropping it you put it down on the counter and start looking at your hand while you try to make a fist and nothing happens.
”Are you alright?”, you turn to answer another colleague standing next to you, but you just stare at her in confusion with no words coming out of your mouth. It's just now that you realise that the sludge like feeling is your legs not being able to support you any longer, so you sink down to your knees trying to avoid hurting yourself. You feel your colleague's hands on you and she sounds worried, but all you're thinking about is how even sitting up is too much, so you start sliding down on the floor untill you're lying down.
You can still see and move eyes and you're still breathing, but you try move your arms and legs with no response. The voices around you are still clear, but everything still feels unreal. Your boss comes running over and kneels down in front of you.
”Blink two times for me”, he says. You do, thankful to discover you still can.
”Should we call an ambulance? One blink for 'yes', two for 'no'”. You blink two times, happy you decided to have that talk with him. But now you're stuck here for a while, unable to do anything.
I have conversion disorder. You likely have not heard of it before, so I thought we can talk a bit about it. The diagnosis is rather rare, but the symptoms can be more common than you think and the disorder is likely underdiagnosed. The short story above is an example of how some of my symptoms might look. These are not all of my symptoms and there are plently of other ones. The symptoms we can see above are:
Dissociation, the unreal, distant, or alien feeling i described. It's also sometimes described as watching a video of your own life.
Functional aphasia, the inability to work language in your brain, with functional meaning that there's not something physically wrong with your brain, and the cause is psychological.
Paralysis of almost the entire body, meaning you can't move.
I'm going to try to not use too much medical language, because it risks losing you lovely people, the readers. I want you to gain some understanding of how it can be to live with this, not for everyone to become experts. But some use of lingo is inevitable, so bear with me.
Good to know: everything I explain here is functional. That means that while the symptoms are somatic, meaing roughly ”of the body”, the cause is not, but rather psychological. Other words for this you might have heard are psychosomatic and hysterical. (Yes, I'm hysterical!)
Other symptoms I experience are constant pain, non-epileptic seizures and lesser involuntary movements, tremors and sounds, impared coordination (ataxia), difficulty swallowing (dysphagia), weakness that's not total paralysis, and not being able to make sounds with my voice (aphonia, as opposed to aphasia). Oh, and paralysis doesn't always affect my whole body, it can be just parts of it. I've eaten plently of meals with other people only using one arm, leaving my dinner company in chock when I explain what's going on.
Some symptoms others with this condition might experience are fainting, numbness, tingling sensations, double vision, blindness, deafness and even hallucinations. Well, I'm happy that's not me!
So this is some intense stuff. If you have invited me to a fun event and I'm not having the best day, I hope you'll find in in your heart to forgive me for not going.
Anyway, that's it for part one! In it I wanted to introduce you to the condition, just give you an idea of what it is. Stay tuned for next time where we will explore more of how it is to live with and who might get it. Exiting stuff!
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