« happy days are here again | Main | It's Monday again »

Sunday, March 26, 2006

LT's tics

Shannon asked about LT's tics in a comment on my last post, and I thought I'd write up a quick post about them in case our experiences can help anyone else with this sort of thing at some point.

We started noticing LT's tics for the first time between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2003. He started out (usually when he was nervous or under stress) with blinking, a very deliberate, repetitive huge kind of blinking. When I asked him (about this and his future tics) he said that he felt like he HAD to do it, that he felt uncomfortable if he didn't, that his eyes felt "wrong" if he didn't. Of course that sent me to the Internet to Google 'blinking tic', but more on what I found in a bit.

So far, the tics that I can remember him having are the following:

• Blinking
• Not-yawning (looked sort of like a yawn but wasn't)
• Squeaking
• Grunting
• Throat-clearing
• an aversion to his own saliva which involved him feeling the need to spit all the time, especially when he was around a smell he didn't like or in a crowd of people. The necks of his shirts were unspeakably nasty for a while, and his lips got chapped. This was a VERY HARD habit for him to break, and we all rejoiced when it was finally gone.
• (this one worries me JUST a little bit) He'll kind of pluck at his eyelashes. I know that there's a syndrome (trichotillomania, if I remember correctly) where pre-teen and teen kids, girls especially but also boys, pull out their hair and their eyelashes. It's frequently stress-related, and I confess that any time I see LT fiddling with his eyelashes I have a difficult time repressing the little "I'm such a horrid mom" freakout when I remind him not to pull on them.

A couple that he never had but that a lot of people with tics do have are: a compulsion to repeat the last few words of what he or other people said, or to just say a word or sound repeatedly and seemingly randomly. Thought I'd include those for any future parents who find this page via Google. Hi future visitors! Be of good cheer. :)

Especially in the early days of his ticcing, I thought he had full-blown Tourette Syndrome, and to be honest in those early days I can't blame myself, because the onset of the tics seemed VERY sudden and he was much more prone to them than he is now, two and a half years later. I did a lot of research, and here's some of what I found out:

• For a diagnosis of TS, a person has to have tics for at least a year with breaks of no longer than... two months, is it? And at least one vocal tic and one motor (body) tic had to be present.
• Repressing the tics in any kind of tic disorder is very difficult for the sufferer, and can result in added stress and a veritable explosion of tics as soon as the need to repress them passes (like, say, at the end of a school day).
• Tics are literally compulsions, and for the person who has one, it's just as urgent as a yawn or a blink. Your brain tells your body "do this", just as it does when it's telling you to blink or yawn, and just as with those things, you can hold off but not forever. The difference is that there's a good reason for you to blink in a normal manner; what goes a little wrong with tics is that your brain starts telling your body to do things that don't necessarily make sense.
• LOTS OF KIDS have tics. In fact, anecdotally I found that I seem to be almost the only person I know who didn't have some kind of tic as a child. These are NOT NECESSARILY Tourette Syndrome; they're just 'transient tic disorder', which means, like it sounds, tics that come and then go away. WAY common. I think 'disorder' is a bit of a misnomer, since it seems to be so normal a thing for kids to have. This is what I think LT actually has.
• Even if he did have Tourette's, it was nothing to freak out about. It's not life-threatening in any way and is not an indicator of deeper psychological problems. It's a relatively minor thing, especially since we homeschool, seeing as...
• Most of the people I encountered online who medicated their kids' tics away did so because the tics were a problem at school, either in the classroom where they were disruptive, or on the playground where other kids would torment them, or both. We quickly decided that unless things got MUCH worse, we weren't going to medicate our son, as the side effects of the medications seemed much more daunting to us than the tics were.
• People who make jokes about Tourette Syndrome generally have no idea what they're talking about. It's not just about repeating swear words for no apparent reason, or saying whatever comes into your head without stopping to think, for crying out loud. Also, obsessive-compulsive disorder (which is believed to be in the same spectrum of disorders as TS, along with a handful of other things like autism and possibly ADD) has nothing to do with needing your cabinets to be organized. I am now really uptight about Tourette Syndrome and OCD jokes.

Right now LT is pretty much tic-free, except in situations of extreme stress when a few of them will pop up. Praise God!

In short, Shannon, don't worry. Even if your son has a nervous tic, don't freak out like I did. (oh, the Nameless Dread that I endured for weeks at a time in those days!) It's nothing to be upset about. It'll most likely pass, and meanwhile there's nothing wrong with him. Tics are great; all the cool kids have them. ;)

Comments

Posted by: jenn at March 26, 2006 08:18 PM

Posted by: dichroic at March 27, 2006 07:41 AM

Posted by: Shannon at March 27, 2006 12:50 PM

Posted by: CountryGoalie at March 27, 2006 06:59 PM

Posted by: Christine at May 22, 2006 12:31 PM

Posted by: Erin at June 24, 2008 03:17 PM

Post a comment