Handy Problems

Once, in a high school English class, our teacher asked us to describe something that annoyed us. For some reason, the thing that I felt the need to mention to my friends was the moment when, having just woken up, you make a fist and your fingers feel so weak you can’t force them closed.

My friends just stared at me. Blinked. “That’s not a thing, Elise.”

I laughed. I thought they were messing with me, that clearly everybody had the same muscle weakness when they woke up. For years afterwards, every time I thought about that (no idea why I’ve never forgotten it…), I still thought they’d been messing with me.

Until I got diagnosed with ataxia and thought… maybe that isn’t normal after all! Maybe this early-morning fist-making-refusal was my fingers showing their very first signs of ataxia. My muscles taking their sweet time to wake up in the morning.

So who knows. Maybe it was ataxia, maybe it wasn’t. All I know is, it still happens—I couldn’t punch anybody upon waking to save my life. And it’s still a thing that annoys me.

The Physical Cost of Ataxia

As you can imagine, having a disease that basically incapacitates your sense of balance is not always fun and games. Some days it seems like all I do is try (and occasionally fail) to not fall over, or knock into furniture and walls while trying to simply move from point A to point B in a straight line. I often joke that this happens so often that I basically trained my body to be highly tolerant to pain, and… well, that’s not a joke. What I said in another article still holds: if I’m not bleeding and all my bones are still in their rightful place, chances are I’ll just get up, shake it off and go on with my day as if nothing happened (while hoping nobody saw me make a fool of myself, kind of like a cat).

That being said, of course I have already had some actual injuries due to my ataxia! Relatively few, all things considered, but I am not made of steel, I do break sometimes.

So a small content warning: this article will contain stories (and some pictures) or a few epic injuries, so maybe if you’re squeamish you’ll want to skip it.