Symptoms: Page Two

Ataxia


Ataxia is not a disease.  It is a description.

Taxi, as in the cab you hail —move from place to place.

A-taxic, difficult (or unable) to move.


It took ten scary years before I found where my motion disturbance lay.  As I look back, I am disappointed in the scores of neurologists I've seen.  You would think one might have realized a connection between my weird motion and the process of proprioception.

Last year, finally, one did.  After my responding to an ingested compound, a recent doctor confirmed  there had been a breach of my blood brain barrier (BBB).  Afterwards, a simple examination led him to be certain of inflammation of the cerebellum, which is responsible for the proprioceptive process.

Even though I told him of protomyxzoa (which was not new to him) he believes it to be caused by Lyme disease, though I never received Lyme as a diagnosis.  For that matter, though I tested positive for protomyxzoa, my other doctor made a point of saying "this is not a diagnosis," and listed me simply as having multiple protozoan infections.  Apparently, unidentified co-infections are easier to slip through insurance.


Proprioception:

Imagine yourself in a strange city.  You have a map, but without knowing where you are currently, you cannot begin to understand which direction to proceed to get to where you are going.  Proprioception is the term used to describe the process by which your brain understands where your body is in space and so understands what it needs to do to move your body where it needs to be.

You might understand it a little easier this way.  Ever been drunk?  Alcohol affects proprioception.  When the officer asks you to close your eyes and touch the tip of your nose, he is testing your proprioceptive process.  You can cheat and peek and get away with it —if you don't get caught.  Visual perception is a second process which tells your brain where your body is.  But if you can't peek then you'll likely touch your nostril, your cheek...your forehead.  This is because the brain cannot accurately read the position of your joints to know precisely where your limbs are, so your result can be way off.

Intoxication is a global impedance in the system and though you might wobble, all parts of your body are working with the same sluggish delay.  They still communicate at the same speed.  Inflammation is not necessarily global and communications within the process can become sporadic and cues can be missed resulting in unsteadiness, jerking and sometimes freezing in place.  This happens most often when something changes; an unexpected dip in the sidewalk; taking a step up or down; changing direction.

It takes a minute.  I look, I concentrate and with a total lack of any grace, I manage to continue.  After a moment my brain understands the new series of motions and some gracefulness returns...until the next change.  One of my oddities related to this is I have the darnedest time washing the edges of a spatula —wipe up, across, down...my hand goes completely out of control and my entire arm goes tense.

That our bodies move is truly remarkable.  The complexity is so vast and any one malfunctioning part of the system is going to be noticeable.  Motion requires complete signals from many parts of the brain; the frontal lobe; the cerebral cortex; the amygdala to name a few.  Proprioception is only a small part of it.  There are also the central and peripheral nervous systems to consider, to say nothing of the affect from fatigue or exhaustion.  The extent and location of the inflammation will determine the sort of motion disturbance that presents.  It is my belief that any of the microbes that are related to the diseases referenced in this blog are capable of causing any movement disorder and quite possibly mimic many diseases, throwing your diagnosis and treatment way off track.  I was diagnosed with Spontaneous Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia and for two years I built my life to deal with that end.

What a relief to find out it was only brain damage.

I can only speak with regard to my own experience but here are some things for you to help your doctor decide if your motion impairment might be related to proprioception.


Less obvious symptoms:

• Loss of gracefulness; dance, sports, craftsmanship.
• Tasks become 'just harder to do'; e.g., stacking blocks, dealing cards.
• Difficulty performing easy, familiar tasks with eyes closed.
• Loss of coordination when something changes; surface grade, or travel direction.
• Loss of coordination during repetitive motions (as in an assembly line).
• Extreme changes in handwriting or artistic ability.
• Concentrating improves simple motions.

More obvious symptoms:

• Jerky motion that smooths if you slow down.
• Difficulty in targeting an object when you reach to grasp it.
• Standing to walk begins with difficulty but quickly becomes easier after several steps.
• Regular stumbling without loss of equilibrium (no vertigo or feeling of falling).
• Feeling as though there is physical resistance against your motion.
• Sudden momentary loss of control resembling the surprise reflex of a baby.
• Unable to stand perfectly still without constant corrections.
• Needing to be in contact with a stationary object to feel relaxed; e.g., merely touching the counter stabilizes you.
• Puzzling results in neurological strength testing; as in uniform loss of strength in opposite appendages, but only in one direction (e.g., can't lift toes against light opposing force although other results are normal).
• Long term motion disturbance without loss of strength or atrophy.
• A particular motion becomes easier or harder depending on body position; e.g., easier to walk with arms raised, easier to stand still with chin down.
• Freezing in place, which can be alleviated with concentration, time, or rocking or swinging to 'get things going'.

If you suffer more than a few of the lesser conditions, or any of the more sever symptoms you might want to pay closer attention to some of the others.  You just might have bugs in your brain.

Symptoms: Page One

These examples are to be considered 'expected to be' and not absolutely due to p-myxzoa.  I'll use p-myxzoa for the sake of this article but there are likely a number of organisms that could be considered in kind.  Celiac disease or Toxoplazmosis might cause or contribute to any of my symptoms as well as unsuspected causes.

A quick list of symptoms:

Ataxia
Body pain; fibromialgia
Brain Fog
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Decision making
eyes; tracking, focus
insatiable deep itching
panic
breath starved; shortness of breath
muted taste
paresthesia
sleep vibrations
skin sensitivity
spasms
Twitches
uncertainty
hearing, tone, pitch
Memory
Processing the abstract
Swollen knees; aching joints
Cognition buzz



Memory: Effect and Affect

This would be the oldest of my symptoms dating back as long as I can remember to early childhood.  While, 'I remember not remembering,' sounds like a setup for a comedy routine, you must understand that there are many kinds of memory.  Any single recall is a tree of connections that can relate to time memory, color memory, smell, sight, sound, feeling....seemingly endless attributes to a single experience.  Pick any of your memories and try to recall everything related to it.  To do so you will need to access maybe hundreds of memory locations in your brain.  Should any of these locations be compromised, the memory will be incomplete, or even compounded with other memories.

Memory is existence.  Without it we are looped in a single moment never knowing where we've been or where we are going.  We cannot function without memory.  For this I believe memory impairment is the most life altering symptom you can suffer.

Labels— This would be my most significant long term memory impediment.  A label would include a word or a name used to identify a person or thing.  Aside from forgetting every ones names, a simple example would be the word 'car'.  Car is a label that is associated with the idea of a big machine that moves people— your Dad's car.  If you were to say to me "Get in the car," I would have no difficulty understanding and could even reply, "Which car?"  Hearing the word triggers the association and I am able to recall the label to say it.  However, without hearing the word it would be lost to my recall.  I'd still understand the big machine and what it did.  Trying to initiate the label myself would be like, "I can't find my...uh...my...that thing I ride around in."  The odd part is, hours or even days later, the word 'car' would pop unexpectedly into my mind as though some mental subroutine had continued to search for the word I needed to complete that sentence.

This memory issue would impact general conversation, school testing and essays, writing of any kind, effecting grades and work quality.  Label misuse and definition confusion are common in society.  I don't think it is all a lack of education.  When speaking, a good many of my everyday words revert to old misconceived meanings.  I try repetitive retraining but even that tends to backslide.  What is first learned becomes strongest.

Inverting positives and negatives is a difficulty I suffer.  Instrumental vs detrimental is one of my many sets of inversion malfunctions.  I am fully aware of what each word means, but in conversation the one might come up in place of the other. Later the mistake will pop into my head, much too late for me to make myself properly understood.

There are human interaction issues related to label association impediment, what might be called fallout.  Once while being questioned by a policeman I paused to recall a word.  He assumed I was taking time to make something up and from then on he believed I was guilty and that anymore that I said in my defense was a lie.  Policemen are trained to suspect, but this could be our teachers, our bosses or a parent influenced by our inability to deliver conversation quickly and accurately.  Those trained in lie detection are taught that stalls like these are a sign of a lie.

Label association impairment changes your life in more ways than you can imagine.

An unrelated but reveling aspect of this same mechanism would be the stroke victim.  Often their labels are mixed up and lost.  "Get in the car," is understood but the reply might be, "Which typewriter?"  Or looking bewildered in a parking lot, "I can't find my typewriter."  The label 'car' has been deleted and 'typewriter' has slipped into its place.  In hearing themselves they know they erred but repeating simply repeats the same mistake.  This indicates actual brain damage where the braincells that held (or pointed to) the label 'car' have died and the association to the big machine that moves people now recalls 'typewriter' instead.  Car has to be relearned.

As a side note, this indicates that hearing a word, verses saying that word require access to separate parts of the brain, the latter seeming to be more vulnerable than the first.  Understanding what we hear while failing to say what we mean is an obvious language center impediment.  Is everyone with this difficulty fighting an infection?  Perhaps.

Opposed to a stroke, with p-myxzoa infection the label is still recallable, just not readily recallable.  It's there.  It comes eventually.  The impediment must be a temporary instance of nerve blockage due to congestion, or more likely, localized oxygen deprivation.  Curing the illness should restore the functions, as I recall fighting the bug back on a few occasions and my speech becoming sharper.

A final language impediment is the temporary loss of word definition and also word appearance.  While writing this I had to look up 'many' because I couldn't recognize it as correct.  Single words come and go from my understanding, the worst of which having been my own name.  There is enough recollection to apply the word but it seems foreign and uncertain.

This all seems like a "get over it" sort of thing, but it is no small issue.  Language center impediment is due to real-time malfunctioning of the association processes of the brain.  Communication is the mainstay of civilization and our real-time reactions count the most to society.  When impaired it affects our social ranking and respectability, impacting our educations, our jobs, our friendships, and our social defenses. Those with impairments are easy targets, while eloquent speakers are less likely to be accused or bullied.  Even though there is no actual relation, people associate intelligence with how well one expresses them self.  This one impediment is a handicap in its own right and will greatly limit our quality of life.  That's difficult to get over.


Facial Recognition— Or face blindness is another socially damaging memory impediment.  Our minds record the subtle differences between faces as different people.  When these differences are lost due to memory impediments it creates a long list of difficulties.  Strangers seem familiar.  New acquaintances are not easily recalled.  Friends are strangers.

I once met a friendly man in a park only to discover that he and I had been working together for nearly a year.  Naturally my failing to recognize him was insulting and ultimately damaged the relationship we had at work.  The odd thing about this sort of memory failure is I recognized him easily so long as he was in the environment I was accustomed to seeing him.

Some faces are recalled easily.  I find it curious that while we each have two eyes, a nose and a mouth that they can be so extraordinarily different.  The subtleties in the shapes of facial elements cause us to find one person attractive and another ugly.  Logically there would be some relationship between how we appreciate a particular face and how it is recorded.  Some of these subtleties are recalled easily, some after repetition, but others simply don't record.  There are people whose apperence I simply cannot recall.

Feeling that you recognize people that you've never seen, associating them with a previously recorded personality or face, would seem like a nuisance but not so big a deal— "Pardon me, I thought you were so-and-so." ...unless you are a witness in a courtroom and wrongly identify an innocent person.  Sitting on a jury would be another place facial recognition impairment is devastating.  We are expected to recognize and catalog people without effort.  For those that can, it is difficult to understand those of us that can't.

Failure to properly recognize a face affects how you respond to the person beneath it.  This affects how they respond to you.  It affects social blending as well as easiness with people.  Without familiarity there are few reasons to go anywhere.  We tend to avoid places that caused us discomfort, like the uncertainties caused by lack of recognition.

Conceptual Memory—  Reading a book, writing a play, planning a website, designing a space shuttle, organizing a wedding,...to do these things efficiently you must be able to process the concepts in large portions.  To read a page only to have forgotten the contents of the previous page; to write a scene and forget where it needed to lead; to have difficulty envisioning the cake and the table cloth and the table in a single concept— let alone the chairs and the guests and the caterers...it is a case of the whole being divided forcing us to deal only with tiny sections at a time.  There is no plan, we merely deal with what is visible.  It is difficult for me to read a book; every page is a micro story seemingly disconnected from the rest of the book.  I find writing non-fiction— such as this blog, is something I can accomplish (quality notwithstanding), but writing the fiction I so love to do is nearly impossible.  Fatigue sets in almost instantly.  Sentences seem disassociated.

I can no longer see a big picture.

I describe this as, "My mind has gotten small," which might not be too far from the truth.  The memory warehouse that used to hold all the details for instant retrieval is now little more than a bus locker.  My theory on this relates to oxygen depletion.  It takes a lot of fuel to push the mental engine and when it starves for breath something must compensate.  You might relate it to a car with a dirty fuel filter, it will idle fine but as soon as you give it the gas it bogs down.

My decent into shrinking conceptual memory was slow and started the same time as the ataxia, which will be discussed in the next update. With the latter being a matter of a breached blood brain barrier, since they seemed to have developed synchronously, I believe conceptual memory impairment is also a blood brain barrier issue.

What are the reasons for memory failure?   A microbe is tiny but still hundreds of times larger than a synapse so they can't directly block the thought process.  Aside from cell death there can only be a limited number of causes.  Since the brain is an electro-chemical processing plant, microbe excrement will introduce numerous gases and compounds into the system that might alter brain chemistry.  A good brainwashing could be in order.  High CO2 levels might affect memory function.  The bug has to breath too.  It steals oxygen and replaces it with CO2 which might prevent red blood cells from absorbing and transporting oxygen to downstream systems.  Nerve impediments from a colony's pressure against it might block signal impulses across neurons.  These are temporary as well as migratory conditions.  What functions one moment might not the next.

I'm not up on my herbs but I know a good many claim the ability to enhance memory. I don't see them as a fix for this, or even a crutch.  There is little effect from enhancements on a crippled system. You're putting octane booster in water. Restoring memory health requires nothing short of getting the bug out.  Since the attack is behind the blood brain barrier which blocks antibiotics the best thing is to keep your natural immune system as healthy as you can.  Diet is the key to that.

We are but a collection of our memories.  We perform only as well as our memories function.  Memory is everything.