When I was thirty years old, I began to feel tingles in my hands and feet. My family doctor sent me for every test he could think of and they all came back negative. Finally, I ended up in the office of a neurologist who asked, “What’s going on in your life?”
“My mother is dying,” I said. She had been dying for several months but she and my father were pretending that she wasn’t dying, especially that she wasn’t dying of liver cirrhosis from alcoholism.
Thus, I was not only grieving the imminent loss of my mother, I was angry, I was furious—about the denial, about this terrible secret which had been festering in our family for years. And I also had a new baby at home, my first child.
“How have you been sleeping?” the neurologist asked. “Not well,” I said. He nodded and said, “Stress can cause physical symptoms.” This was news to me. I had grown up believing the body and mind were separate things.
“I think when your life settles down, your symptoms will go away,” the neurologist said and they did. But not until I took care of my mind as well as my body. Talked to a counselor as well as my doctor.
Learned a new way of understanding myself. I’ve never forgotten.
