Tourette's and the people that suffer from it
**Warning, vulgar language in video.**
Jade O'Connell is just one of many that suffer from Tourette Syndrome and posts videos to YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram, and the like. I learned of this young lady from my daughter. Jade often posts videos of her baking with her family members and they are funny videos. She even has a few that show her doing makeup on herself and others, which is also funny. She does this to show that there's a humorous part of the disease, but she also posts videos where her and her friend "Uncle Tics" answer questions and discuss the very negative aspects to the disease too. Well, last night I watched her have what she [and other Tourette's sufferers] calls a tic attack. It broke my heart. I cried for her. I watched the whole thing [about 10 min]. She commented that this "tic attack" lasted 40 minutes, but that she had only posted 10 minutes of the video. I can only imagine how exhausting it is.
About 30 seconds into the video, I thought to myself, "I'm watching someone's brain completely short circuit." In modern cars, it would be like if the computer began to fry and the lights, blower motor, windshield wipers, dings, bells, the horn, etc. all began to randomly do things simultaneously. Then... she stopped breathing and her brain would only allow her to take in tiny short breaths. I didn't post that particular video because while I watched the entire thing, many would struggle watching even a minute of it.
My uncle's best friend since Kindergarten has Tourette Syndrome (TS). He was young when he started having tics; maybe 8 or 9. His ultra Christian parents [who adopted him as an infant] believed that he was possessed. They had an exorcism done. I don't know how old he was when he finally was diagnosed with TS, but I've known him my whole life and I can see that his TS is not as severe compared to some, but then it's a little worse than others. He has only motor tics; he has tics in his neck, blinks, and flips his hair. He's kept his hair long for as long as I can remember and my understanding is that he grew it out and kept it that way because it prevented him from hitting himself in the face and head. What sucks is that while meds can help with tic control for some, meds don't work for all that suffer.
The video I posted is Jade simply explaining what TS is and how it can affect people.
**NO POLITICS**
This isn't to depress you. I find neurological anomalies fascinating. This is one that even those that have studied it for their entire careers still don't understand.
I'm putting this to public. I think I would enjoy to see some comments.
My dearly departed friend Sue has a son who has Tourette's. He would grunt and make noises, which was bad but what was really awful is that Tourette's has triggers, and his brother was a trigger, and his worst outbursts, with cursing and screaming, came when he saw his brother. The good news is that he eventually grew out of most of this, between meds and bio-feedback.
I found out that the cursing outburst are rare in Tourette's. It's more uncontrollable grunting and ticks.
That's correct. Like I said above, my uncle's best friend has a neck tic, eye blink (nose twitches too sometimes at the same time now that I think about it), and hair flip. Sadly, his didn't really get better, but no worse either. I've seen a lot of people have throat clearing or a quick breath through the nose as a tic.
What I find really interesting is that out of all these TS media personalities, most of them are from New Zealand or Australia. It makes me wonder if there's a genetic mutation that occurs because of location in the world that dates back hundreds or thousands of years (or longer) or something.