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Sunday, October 6, 2019

Brainstorm

brainstorm
noun
   1. a spontaneous group discussion to produce     ideas and ways of solving problems.
   2. a moment in which  one is suddenly unable to think clearly or act sensibly.
   3. a chaotic jumble of phantom sensations and sounds in the brain resembling the character of a violent electrical storm (unofficial MS definition). 

For the last three nights, I've experienced what I call a brainstorm. It has nothing to do with coming up with inspired ideas or schemes, nor has it to do with a sudden inability to think or act sensibly, given that one is just waking from sleep when he experiences, or rather suffers, the phenomenon. 

What I mean to describe is an essentially indescribable conflagration in the brain. This is often preceded by a ringing in the ears before sleep (though of course it's not really in the ears, as one is not really hearing it, but experiencing it). This is usually accompanied by at least a mild headache. One then awakes somewhere in the middle of the night to find the ringing accompanied by a sense of pulsation in the brain itself coupled with what I can only describe as 'electrical' sounds, like broken, buzzing, sparking twitching circuits, which themselves throb like individual aches. This goes on until you simply fall to sleep again. There's no way to stop it, other than unconsciousness. 

I always picture this as constituting an awareness of the destruction of myelin (the protective covering of nerves) as it is occurring, like hearing the chewing of termites inside a table leg. I always imagine that MS is getting ready to put another body part or system out of service, and what I am hearing is the gnawing through of a final thread of tissue, the denuding of the coppery electrified nerve, the hissing, hushing, sibilating shriek of violation. 

In short, it's unpleasant. 

Why this happens, or what exactly it is, I do not know, nor has any doctor ever been able to say (or to even understand what I'm talking about, for that matter). 

Does it even have anything to do with MS? Who can say? What I can say, though, is that I had never experienced this phenomenon prior to MS, and I have experienced it regularly ever since. It comes and goes, and may be absent for months at a time. It does not seem instigated by anything in particular. But as with any symptom, I insist that it must have meaning, for  a symptom by definition is an expression of an underlying malady.

Then again, maybe it doesn't have to be a malady. Maybe this is the sound of myelin repairing itself, of ongoing construction at a building site, the clack of hammers, the buzz of equipment--a cacophony that is annoying while it is in progress but which leads to the accomplishment of something stable and new. 

Hey, I like the sound of that! 

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