When you fall ill, you expect the symptoms to cluster
sensibly in the direction of a diagnosis, something known, something other
people have had, something with a name. So what happens when you experience
symptoms that don’t cluster sensibly? Could there be diseases unique to
individuals, or ones so peculiar that nobody has considered them as groups of
symptoms which are causally related? We all like to think we’re unique, that we’re
individuals, but we wouldn’t want to think we were peculiar… Sometimes we like safety in numbers. We like to be told,
yes, you’ve got X, it’s as common as muck, take these three times a day. Off
you go. Sorted.
Over the last decade or so I’ve had episodes of what I’ve
come to call January disease, since typically it strikes in the first few days
of the New Year, and is generally gone by the end of the month. Sometimes it
lingers a bit into February and mild versions of it can occur transiently at
any time of year, but mostly it’s January-specific.
I’ve no idea what it is except that it’s sleep related and
also involves my left leg. It can occur when I’m falling asleep, it can wake me
up, or I have an episode of it as I wake up. This can happen with normal night time
sleep, or if I have a snooze during the day. Always it involves an ache in my
left lower leg, ankle or foot, combined with a feeling of nausea or feeling
sick, twitching (usually the left leg, but occasionally other limbs), and
visual imagery experienced as unpleasant or even painful (although the content
is not usually conventionally so), which keeps me awake.
At its worst, several years ago, the condition involved
multiple myoclonic spasms, even whole body spasms while I was asleep and
unaware of what was happening, and strange mental phenomena – a variety of noises
in my head, bangs, and a sound like a snowball gently hitting a wall, plus
visual imagery which often resembled a TV screen featuring what looked like
rapidly fast-forwarding video. These were not like normal dream images, nor
hypnagogic ones, which from time to time I enjoy. I began to dread bedtime. At
one point the twitching caused me to involuntarily bite my tongue. As I say,
this was years ago, and by January this year – though the condition arrived
right on cue - it was much more mild. Now, almost out of February, it’s more or
less gone. However, one night recently I awoke - with all the other symptoms as
described above - to an image of a pile of fragments of leopard skin fabric
piled up in a city park. An image that hurt.
How bonkers is that?
Naturally, when this condition first appeared, I was
alarmed, and consulted my GP. Too scared to reveal all the symptomatology I
talked her into a diagnosis of restless legs syndrome and she prescribed
quinine, whose advertised potential side effects encouraged me not to take it.
Meanwhile I was on the internet researching sleep disorders, epilepsy, migraine,
brain tumours, parkinsonism, multiple sclerosis, the myoclonus and its disorders.
Nothing quite fitted the symptomatology. I wondered if it could be a trapped
nerve somewhere that gets pressed upon when I lose muscle tone. I do not have
any diagnosed underlying medical conditions, nor do I take ‘substances’. What
could it be?
The fact that I’ve had this thing for about ten years, that
I’m still here and that I’m fine for the rest of the year suggests that it can’t
be anything all that serious, and I’m no longer unduly worried about it. Just
mystified. I discovered quite early on that I could temporarily cure it by
waking up properly and walking around for a bit, and even more strangely that,
if I mentally told it to “go away”, it would oblige. It’s difficult to
describe, but at its worst there was a sensation that I was accessing what felt
like a mirror of my normal consciousness, something like a double; I was
disappearing into my own brain. It could be that for some unknown reason I
sometimes land in an unusual level of consciousness somewhere between waking
and sleep, somewhere that I shouldn’t be. Why the left limb involvement, though,
I have no idea. An odd interaction of mind and matter. Curiously, I no longer
seem to get the normal sort of myoclonic spasms on falling asleep, like I used
to occasionally.
And why January? Is it an after-effect of Christmas
overindulgence, something dietary, something related to shortage of daylight, to
ambient temperature, to the handling of a new calendar, to some underlying
disease which has periods of activity and remission, or is it the consequence
of some mysterious annual biorhythm or a coincidental pile-up of other factors?
I don’t know.
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