The tiny coiled serpent revisited: Part 1
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- May 4, 2025
- 408
I’m revisiting this two-part essay on my Tourette’s for reasons I never thought I would need to. I’ll only say this once — just because you haven’t heard of something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Diagnoses of neurological diseases are a godsend for people who suffer from them. Science brings us answers, and cutting funding to study these disorders — because of a belief that money is being wasted and “I never heard about them when I was young” — is hogwash.
I sit at my tiny desk, a girl of 6 in a first grade classroom. My feet are clad in tennis shoes, dangling from the blonde wood chair that holds me, a thick black pencil in my hand. Twinges, like tiny pinpricks of fire, lead down my arm and into my fingers. I look at them as they slowly take on a life of their own, shaking and shaking and shaking. My fingers keep shaking out in front of me like a maniacal dance I can’t control.
Every bone encased inside the skin on my tiny fingers must shake at just the right interval, or I would need to start the shaking all over again. Tension creeps into the back of my neck, at the base of my skull, and I feel it rest there like a small, coiled animal. The bell rings for recess, my process interrupted.
I must start all over again.
I don’t know when the tics started. I do know when they ended, or at least the moment when I learned to control them. They lay in wait inside my brain, firing along nerve centers that jangled and mixed in a mash, making me do things I couldn’t conceive of on my own — things like jumping and kicking my legs up behind me, feeling the exact angles my legs bent at, and if not done simultaneously (as well as perfectly) would need repeated.
Maybe it was shrugging my shoulders, each blade tensing until I could feel the muscles on each side flexing at the same moment and repeating if the motion was off. The shaking of my hands was the first thing I remember, with various others in between that I can’t.
The anxious feeling of it, the inability to control the impulses that raged inside my central nervous system, was akin to tumbling down a hill, rolling over and over while your head bounced against the ground until it was dizzy with the effort. It took concerted effort to hide what my brain compelled me to do, and a simple “stop doing that” didn’t work for something not understood.
My mom first noticed my tics after having read a magazine article on a little-known disorder. It made her stop and think. The symptoms were the same, so she took me, article in hand, up to our local family M.D. He concurred with her that it did seem to mimic the tics I displayed. He recommended seeing a specialist.
It may have been several years later when I underwent a brain scan and evaluation by a doctor whose piercing eyes I remember distinctly. I think he looked clean through me. They placed myriad teeny-tiny wires on my scalp while a small needle took readings on a graph, its scratching the only sound I could hear in the room. The glue from those patches and wires wouldn’t wash out of my hair for days.
An MRI was performed on my brain to make sure everything was where it needed to be. The worry and severity of what I might have never sunk in, and the flow of my life was uninterrupted. When we went back in for diagnosis, it was exactly as the article my mom had read had suggested.
I was diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome.
This is how the disorder is described in medical terms: Tourette’s syndrome is a neurological disorder characterized by repetitive, stereotyped, involuntary movements and vocalizations called tics. The disorder is named for Dr. Georges Gilles de la Tourette, the pioneering French neurologist who in 1885 first described the condition in an 86-year-old French noblewoman.
We had a name. I later learned there weren’t a lot of facts and well-known treatments designed for Tourette’s, and it was a gray area in medical realms during that time. Mental health disorders tend to stay in gray areas until they can no longer. Very small pills soon appeared in my house, and every morning my mom would cut one in half for me to swallow with my breakfast. Haldol, a powerful antipsychotic used to treat bipolar, mania and hallucinations, was given to me as a 10-year-old to treat the disorder. It was known to quell the powerful urges of the tics that overtook me.
I don’t remember how long I took the pills. I don’t think it was for long. There is no cure for TS.
Part 2 next week.
Melissa Herrera is a reflective writer who captures the beauty and sorrow of change. With a career spanning 14 years as an opinion columnist and the publication of two books, she resides in Stark County with her husband and four cats. She writes to preserve memories. You can reach her at junkbabe68@gmail.com.