OCD.

This is a perfect picture of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and what it does to a person. Now I make fun of myself and my OCD. I do. And that's okay. I"m just being honest. What really gets on my nerves though is when someone says they're so OCD and is referring to being well organized. It's not just about that, it's a sick and sadistic need to be organized, or something bad may happen to you or a loved one! It's bloody torture! It can eat at you and eat at you all the livelong ruddy day! You can't relax. You can't break free from your routine. You're stuck, knowing that you can't go to bed or leave the house unless your shoes are put away, or you've checked every single knob on the stove, and you've walked an even number of steps, flicked the light switch a certain number of times, or washed your hands properly. And it's not even about that. It's about the vicious cycles of thought patterns and processes that are the worst, the voices that tell you you're not good enough, you're not perfect enough, you never do anything correctly, you've slacked off, you've gained too much weight, and so many other unwanted messages being sent to your amygdala (the part of the brain that examines and processes fear). The amygdala processes those thoughts as real fears, rather than temporary emotions, which stem from the conscious mind. That's OCD, plain and simple. But, let's look at it from a medical standpoint. (I know, I sort of went there already.)


You can read more about it here. 

Obsessive-compulsive disorder

Obsessive-compulsive neurosis; OCD

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder in which people have unwanted and repeated thoughts, feelings, ideas, sensations (obsessions), or behaviors that make them feel driven to do something (compulsions).

Often the person carries out the behaviors to get rid of the obsessive thoughts, but this only provides temporary relief. Not performing the obsessive rituals can cause great anxiety.

Causes, incidence, and risk factors

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is more common than was once thought. Most people who develop it show symptoms by age 30. ***I was showing symptoms since the age of three.***

There are several theories about the cause of OCD, but none have been confirmed. Some reports have linked OCD to head injury and infections. Several studies have shown that there are brain abnormalities in patients with OCD, but more research is needed.

About 20% of people with OCD have tics, which suggests the condition may be related to Tourette syndrome. However, this link is not clear.

Symptoms

• Obsessions or compulsions that are not due to medical illness or drug use
• Obsessions or compulsions that cause major distress or interfere with everyday life

There are many types of obsessions and compulsions. One example is an excessive fear of germs and the compulsion to repeatedly wash the hands to ward off infection.

The person usually recognizes that the behavior is excessive or unreasonable.

Signs and tests

Your own description of the behavior can help diagnose the disorder. A physical exam can rule out physical causes, and a psychiatric evaluation can rule out other mental disorders.

Questionnaires, such as the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (YBOCS), can help diagnose OCD and track the progress of treatment.

Treatment

OCD is treated using medications and therapy.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been shown to be the most effective type of psychotherapy for this disorder. The patient is exposed many times to a situation that triggers the obsessive thoughts, and learns gradually to tolerate the anxiety and resist the urge to perform the compulsion. Medication and CBT together are considered to be better than either treatment alone at reducing symptoms.

Psychotherapy can also be used to:

• Provide effective ways of reducing stress
• Reduce anxiety
• Resolve inner conflicts
  
  
  
  

Migraine.

My month did not start out the way I was hoping it would...




I've been sick with a migraine all day today...

I got up at seven, and we took my mother-in-law to visit my father-in-law in the hospital ICU. She goes and stays there and visits every three hours. And the ICU hours are weird anyway. It looks something like this:

ICU Hours:

6:00 a.m. to 6:30 a.m.
9:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.
12 noon to 12:30 p.m.
3:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
6:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
8:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

The only ICU visit my mother-in-law doesn't attend is the 6 a.m. to 6:30 a.m. slot.

Doug and I drop her off for the 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. visit, and she stays there until after the last visit, the 8:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. time slot. Then, we take her home or she stays here on our couch. This schedule has been going on for almost a week now.

After we drop her off, Doug drives us to church. He is the director over the entire media production that occurs during service. He usually works both morning services, so he has to be there at 8:30 a.m. every Sunday morning. I am not a morning person, so I will usually drive back home, have another coffee, and get ready. Unfortunately, this morning's routine didn't work out.

As I drive home, I literally forget which way I'm going, and I end up on the other side of town. I assume it's because I'm not awake. I turn around and head for home. I crank up the music. I'm doing okay. I pull into my parking spot and stop the car, grab the keys, set it to lock, and get out. That's when pressure and dizziness hit me like a ton of bricks. I somehow make it into the house and sit down. That's when the vision loss occurred.

For those who have never had a migraine, they're evil. They're horrible, evil, and cannot be reasoned with. My migraines, however, mimic strokes. And since some of you have asked me to describe the anatomy of one of my typical migraines, and the fact that I sort of have my wits about me, I'm going to give it to the old college try.

It usually starts out with an aura. Sometimes, I recognize the auras, other times, I don't. My auras consist of, and these are in no certain order;

1. Deja vu (I've done this before.)
2. Vision loss
3. Foot cramps (The debilitating kind that make me drop to the ground and cry.)
4. Memory loss (I'll be in the middle of something and not remember what I'm doing, like when I was driving home this morning.)
5. Intense shoulder pain
6. Aphasia (I will know what I want to say, but another word will come out, usually a related word for me. For example, jacket may be coat, and coat may be paint. Other times, my speech is slurred, and what I'm trying to say makes absolutely no sense at all.)
7. Unexplained Fatigue/Weakness

I've had foot cramps for two days, and mild shoulder pain off and on since last night. I attributed it to stress, being on my feet (a mile walk to the ICU for two time slots), and not getting enough sleep.

So I make it inside, and I sit down on the bed. And I text Doug. I try to keep it simple because I know the further into the migraine I get, the worse my text messages become. I stretched out and tried to focus on something, and that's when the vision loss began. This usually consists of total vision loss in one eye. (Sometimes, I'll have sparkles in my vision, where everything will glitter. It looks pretty, but it's a sign of impending suffering for me.)

Once the vision loss occurs, I need to get somewhere and lay down immediately. Vision loss is followed by one sided numbness, in which the right or left side of my body will go totally numb. I can't use any part of the numb side of my body. I can't even walk without assistance. One time, I could not swallow, which scared the heck out of Doug. This is also the phase where nausea, photophobia, and phonophobia will happen. I rarely have nausea or phonophobia, but I always have photophobia.

Once the numbness stage is over, the intense head pain sets in. I lay in bed and wait for welcomed unconsciousness to overtake me. And when sleep comes, the worst is usually over. For this, I am grateful.

Whenever I wake up, which can be as long as eight to twelve hours later, whatever side was affected by the migraine is quite wonky, uncooperative, and sometimes doesn't work at all. It can range from weakness, to pain, to useless. I'll have to use my other arm/hand to do everything I need to do, and my foot/leg will be weak and sometimes drag. I also can't wear my floppies (flip flops to the natives) after a migraine. These after effects can last for up to three days before I regain full strength/use of the affected area.

Because my migraines are intense and mimic strokes/TIA's, I'm supposed to make a trip to the emergency room to make sure I haven't had a stroke. They also check for seizure activity and other neurological issues that would or could cause these or similar symptoms. I'm usually given a clean bill of health and sent home.

Unfortunately, going to the emergency room is not always convenient. Doug works and goes to school full time. He has responsibilities which often means I have to fend for myself. If my symptoms are severe, he will drop everything to take care of me. We have to determine when we both agree that I should go to the emergency room. If I have a new symptom, such as the swallowing issue, we go to the ER. That's a given. The first few times I had nausea, since it rarely occurs, we took a trip to the ER. My first experience with phonophobia, we went to the ER. If my symptoms/after effects last longer than usual or are more intense than usual, we will go to the ER. I will sometimes panic, which doesn't help, and Doug will have to try to calm me down. This is often futile. Today's migraine was not ER worthy.

Forgive me for being all over the place. I'm still a bit clapped out.

I sent the text message to Doug. I stretched out in bed, covered myself up, and shut my eyes, waiting for the dizziness to stop, waiting to hear the message tone indicating that Doug had received my text. He knew what was going on. He asked if I made it home before the migraine hit, and I managed to reply with, "sort of." He was just glad I made it home and was safe in bed. The problem was that I had the car. Driving with a migraine is quite dangerous. I said I would try to sleep it off. I was experiencing extra fatigue/weakness today, and was able to go to sleep before the numbness really got to me. Doug called me several times to check on me and make sure I was okay.

Thankfully, I slept through the worst part of it, and woke up at one. Church was over. I let him know when I was leaving, and he allotted a certain amount of time for my arrival before threatening to send out a search party. He prayed, I prayed. I made it to the church, crawled into the passenger side of the car, and slept until he was finished shutting down the media equipment. He spent the afternoon taking care of me. He got me a venti nonfat chai tea latte. He brought me some glazed donuts to munch on, then he took me home and put me to bed. That's where I've been ever since. He stopped in to visit his father. I feel bad that I couldn't make it to see him today. I didn't even work on my book today. I just don't have the mental capacity, plus my right side is affected, and it hurts to type. Most of my typing was accomplished with one hand. Thank God I'm ambidextrous! If not, I would be in serious trouble...

Anyway, I'm still feeling ill, but I made it through. It wasn't the worst migraine I've experienced, but still not ER worthy. I always wonder in the back of my mind if I will be so lucky next time...

Sleep.

Sleep...I get so little that when the chance comes around, I try to take it...

It started out as a bad day. Doug woke me up after I had only slept for two hours. I verbally assaulted him, although I don't remember half of what I said because I wasn't fully awake. My head was pounding, my body was throbbing, everything ached, and my eyes felt like they were burning in my sockets...I yelled, I screamed, I cried, and if I were awake enough, I might have thrown things. I'm not proud of myself, and I'm glad that Doug is very forgiving. I was exhausted, fatigued, and very stroppy.

We visited Doug's father at the hospital ICU, then had breakfast...I was so tired and upset that I had a nosebleed. I don't know if I was that upset, or if my blood pressure skyrocketed in my anger. Whatever the case, my body and my mind were just as mess!

Doug took me home. I changed into my pajamas, got into bed, but I was too tired to sleep. So I sent out a text asking for prayer for healing and rest. And I got what I asked for...



It was beautiful!

I turned the air conditioner on freeze out mode, turned up the fan, stretched out in bed, covered myself up in my snuggie, then topped that off with my sheet and comforter. I wrapped myself into a cocoon, even pulled the covers up over my face so that I saw nothing but dark...



The light pouring through the window didn't matter. The sound of the television started to fade, even the sound of the fan seemed farther away, somewhere in the distance where people were awake. Everything slowed and quieted for this moment. Peace enveloped me, as I slept safe in my cocoon, forming into a newer, stronger, happier me.



I had bits and pieces of dreams...nothing scary, because I was somewhere safe. I felt like the above picture, that I was laying in a hammock, the sun warming me, the sound of the water moving softly, suspended only by a tiny piece of mesh cloth, but I knew I wasn't going to fall.



Then, I felt like I was laying in the midst of a tree, surrounded by grass, dandelion fluff swirling around me in the wind. Again, there was a body of water beside me. Everything was green and beautiful. What a glorious place to be! I somehow knew it was a dream, but I didn't care.



As I woke up, I fully expected to be on a float in the body of water I kept seeing, not even caring how I got there. I wondered how I was going to get back to shore, but I decided that it didn't matter. I turned around...



...and woke up in my own bed. I looked at the clock on my mobile phone, my eyes no longer burning in their sockets, I made out a blurry, 4:00 p.m. underneath the date. It took me a while to become conscious. I slipped in and out again into the place by the water, too warm to remove the covers, suddenly feeling like someone had wrapped their arms around me, and was gently holding me in sleep.

Then, the fan became louder, and I heard the sound of people talking. I opened my eyes, and it was over.

I got sleep, and it was the best feeling in the world. Nothing can compare to it, the feeling of warmth and safety, and rejuvenation.

Medically speaking, your brain and body go through a period of repairing, restoring, and recharging. This is why after a neurological event such as a migraine or a seizure, or even a head injury, the body demands sleep. It powers itself down in order to recharge.

I feel like I've been running on empty for a while, fatigued, and exhausted.

I need to get more sleep...

Top Ten Bizarre Illnesses

Before starting on the list, I should point out – these are all authentic medical ailments.

Does this make you feel sick?

1. Art Attack (Stendhal Syndrome): Dr Graziella Magherini, author of The Stendhal Syndrome, has studied more than 100 tourists in Florence, Italy, who became ill in the presence of great works of art. The symptoms include heart palpitations, dizziness, and stomach pains. The typical sufferer is between the ages of 26 and 40 who rarely leaves home..Dr Magherini believes the syndrome is a result of jet lag, travel stress, and the shock of an overwhelming sense of the past. She says: “Very often there’s the anguish of death.’ The disorder is named after a nineteenth-century French novelist who was overwhelmed by the frescoes in Florence’s Santa Croce Church. Particularly upsetting works of art are: Michaelangelo’s statue of David, Caravaggio’s painting of Bacchus, and the concentric circles of the Duomo cupola. You can read a much more indepth article on Stendhal Syndrome here.

Exercise Caution...

2. Hula-hoop Intestine: On February 26, 1992, Beijing worker Xu Denghai was hospitalised with a twisted intestine after playing excessively with a hula-hoop. His was the third case in the several weeks since a hula-hoop craze had swept China. The Beijing evening news advised people to warm up before playing, and to avoid hula-hooping straight after eating. [I cannot verify this story]

Not just for bunnies...

3. Carrot Addiction: In 1992, the British Journal of Addiction described three unusual cases of carrot dependence. One 40 year old man had replaced cigarettes with carrots. He ate as many as five bunches a day and thought about them obsessively. According to two Czech psychiatrists, when carrots were withdrawn, he and the other patients lapsed into heightened irritability. American Government site relating a case of carrot addiction and its treatment.

YUMMY!

4. Cutlery Craving: The desire to eat metal objects is comparatively common. Occasionally there is an extreme case, such as that of 47 year old Englishman Allison Johnson. An alcoholic burglar with a compulsion to eat silverware, Johnson has had 30 operations to remove strange things from his stomach. In 1992, he had eight forks and the metal sections of a mop head lodged in his body. He has been repeatedly jailed and then released, each time going immediately to a restaurant and ordering lavishly. Unable to pay, he would then tell the owner to call the police, and eat cutlery until they arrived. Johnson’s lawyer said of his client, ‘He finds it hard to eat and obviously has difficulty going to the lavatory.” BBC article with photographs illustrating the mental disorder that leads people to eat metal.

Help, my hand is out to get me!

5. Dr Strangelove Syndrome: Officially known as Alien Hand Syndrome, this bizarre neurological illness affects thousands of people. It is caused by damage to certain parts of the brain, and causes one of a person’s hands to act independently of the other and of its owner’s wishes. For example, the misbehaving hand may do the opposite of what the normal one is doing: if a person is trying to button a shirt with one hand, the other will follow along and undo the buttons. If one hand pulls up trousers, the other will pull them down. Sometimes the hand may become aggressive – pinching, slapping, or punching the patient. In at least one case, it tried to strangle its owner. Says neurologist Rachelle Doody, ‘Often a patient will sit on the hand, but eventually it gets loose and starts doing everything again.” Wikipedia article on this mental disorder.

This is the only pic you're getting!

6. Mud Wrestlers Rash (Palastaie Limosae): Twenty-four men and women wrestled in calf-deep mud at the University of Washington. Within 36 hours, 7 wrestlers were covered with patches of pus-filled red bumps similar to pimples, and the rest succumbed later. Bumps were on areas of the skin not covered by bathing-suits – one unlucky wrestler had wrestled in the nude. The dermatitis palastaie limosae, or “muddy wrestling rash”, may have been caused by manure-tainted mud. The Journal of the American Medical Association article on a study and results about this disease.

Don't get too close...

7. Electric People: According to British paranormalist Hilary Evans, some people are ‘upright human [electric] eels, capable of generating charges strong enough to knock out streetlights and electronic equipment.” Cases of electric people date back to 1786, the most famous of which is that of 14 year old Angelique Cottin, whose presence caused compass needles to gyrate wildly. To further investigate this phenomenon, Evans founded SLIDE, the Street Lamp Interference Data Exchange. Wikipedia article on this unusual phenomenon.

Is her voice really that annoying?

8. Mary Hart Epilepsy: The case of Dianne Neale, 49, appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. In the much-publicised 1991 event, Neale apparently suffered epileptic seizures at hearing the voice of Entertainment Tonight co-host Mary Hart. Neale experienced an upset stomach, a sense of pressure in her head, and confusion. Laboratory tests confirmed the abnormal electrical discharges in her brain, and Neale had a press conference to insist that she was not crazy. She said she bore no hard feelings toward Hart, who apologised on the air for the situation. Report on the case as well as a similar case involving Pokemon. Neil suffered a temporal lobe seizure.

I'm sorry, what were you saying?

9. Foreign Accent Syndrome: There are about 50 recorded cases of Foreign Accent Syndrome, in which people who have suffered strokes or other injuries adopt a new accent. For example, Tiffany Roberts of Florida suffered a stroke and then began speaking with an English accent. She even adopted such Anglicisms as ‘bloody’ and ‘loo’. Ms Roberts had never been to Great Britain, and was not a fan of British television shows.Perhaps the oddest case concerned a Norwegian woman who had fallen into a coma after being hit by shrapnel during an air raid in 1941. When she woke up, she spoke with a thick German accent. She was then ostracised by her neighbours. Wikipedia article on Foreign Accent Syndrome.

That's just weird...

10. Uncombable Hair Syndrome: Also known as hair-felting, this condition causes hair to form a tangled mass. In a case reported in 1993, a 39 year old woman’s hair fell out and was replaced by dry, coarse, curly hair which was so tangled that it was impossible to comb. It lacked knots, kinks, or twists that would explain the tangling. The hairs themselves were strangely shaped: the cross-sections were triangular, grooved, or shaped like kidneys instead of circular.The unusual solution to the condition is to cut off the solidified mass of hair. In one case, a woman from Indiana wanted to keep her hair, having spent 24 years growing it. After two and a half months of lubricating her hair with olive oil and separating the strands with knitting needles, her hair returned to normal. US government medical site on this disorder and the DermAtlas photos.

Source: The Book of Lists

(I added the photos and captions!)

Top Ten Myths About the Brain.

Top Ten Myths About the Brain

When it comes to this complex, mysterious, fascinating organ, what do—and don’t—we know?

By Laura Helmuth

1. We use only 10 percent of our brains.
This one sounds so compelling—a precise number, repeated in pop culture for a century, implying that we have huge reserves of untapped mental powers. But the supposedly unused 90 percent of the brain is not some vestigial appendix. Brains are expensive—it takes a lot of energy to build brains during fetal and childhood development and maintain them in adults. Evolutionarily, it would make no sense to carry around surplus brain tissue. Experiments using PET or fMRI scans show that much of the brain is engaged even during simple tasks, and injury to even a small bit of brain can have profound consequences for language, sensory perception, movement or emotion.

2. “Flashbulb memories” are precise, detailed and persistent.
We all have memories that feel as vivid and accurate as a snapshot, usually of some shocking, dramatic event—the assassination of President Kennedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the attacks of September 11, 2001. People remember exactly where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, what they saw or heard. But several clever experiments have tested people’s memory immediately after a tragedy and again several months or years later.

3. It’s all downhill after 40 (or 50 or 60 or 70).
It’s true, some cognitive skills do decline as you get older. Children are better at learning new languages than adults—and never play a game of concentration against a 10-year-old unless you’re prepared to be humiliated. Young adults are faster than older adults to judge whether two objects are the same or different; they can more easily memorize a list of random words, and they are faster to count backward by sevens.

But plenty of mental skills improve with age. Vocabulary, for instance—older people know more words and understand subtle linguistic distinctions. Given a biographical sketch of a stranger, they’re better judges of character. They score higher on tests of social wisdom, such as how to settle a conflict. And people get better and better over time at regulating their own emotions and finding meaning in their lives.

4. We have five senses.
Sure, sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch are the big ones. But we have many other ways of sensing the world and our place in it. Proprioception is a sense of how our bodies are positioned. Nociception is a sense of pain. We also have a sense of balance—the inner ear is to this sense as the eye is to vision—as well as a sense of body temperature, acceleration and the passage of time.

5. Brains are like computers.
We speak of the brain’s processing speed, its storage capacity, its parallel circuits, inputs and outputs. The metaphor fails at pretty much every level: the brain doesn’t have a set memory capacity that is waiting to be filled up; it doesn’t perform computations in the way a computer does; and even basic visual perception isn’t a passive receiving of inputs because we actively interpret, anticipate and pay attention to different elements of the visual world.

6. The brain is hard-wired.
This is one of the most enduring legacies of the old “brains are electrical circuits” metaphor.

But one of the biggest discoveries in neuroscience in the past few decades is that the brain is remarkably plastic. In blind people, parts of the brain that normally process sight are instead devoted to hearing. Someone practicing a new skill, like learning to play the violin, “rewires” parts of the brain that are responsible for fine motor control. People with brain injuries can recruit other parts of the brain to compensate for the lost tissue.

7. A conk on the head can cause amnesia.
Next to babies switched at birth, this is a favorite trope of soap operas: Someone is in a tragic accident and wakes up in the hospital unable to recognize loved ones or remember his or her own name or history. (The only cure for this form of amnesia, of course, is another conk on the head.)

8. We know what will make us happy.
In some cases we haven’t a clue. We routinely overestimate how happy something will make us, whether it’s a birthday, free pizza, a new car, a victory for our favorite sports team or political candidate, winning the lottery or raising children. Money does make people happier, but only to a point—poor people are less happy than the middle class, but the middle class are just as happy as the rich. We overestimate the pleasures of solitude and leisure and underestimate how much happiness we get from social relationships.

9. We see the world as it is.
We are not passive recipients of external information that enters our brain through our sensory organs. Instead, we actively search for patterns (like a Dalmatian dog that suddenly appears in a field of black and white dots), turn ambiguous scenes into ones that fit our expectations (it’s a vase; it’s a face) and completely miss details we aren’t expecting. In one famous psychology experiment, about half of all viewers told to count the number of times a group of people pass a basketball do not notice that a guy in a gorilla suit is hulking around among the ball-throwers.

10. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.
Some of the sloppiest, shoddiest, most biased, least reproducible, worst designed and most overinterpreted research in the history of sciencepurports to provide biological explanations for differences between men and women. Eminent neuroscientists once claimed that head size, spinal ganglia or brain stem structures were responsible for women’s inability to think creatively, vote logically or practice medicine. Today the theories are a bit more sophisticated: men supposedly have more specialized brain hemispheres, women more elaborate emotion circuits. Though there are some differences (minor and uncorrelated with any particular ability) between male and female brains, the main problem with looking for correlations with behavior is that sex differences in cognition are massively exaggerated.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Top-Ten-Myths-About-the-Brain.html?c=y&page=2