It’s been a bit of a tough week. I returned to my medical routine, and my brain biofeedback was changed up. As I wrote earlier, we’d added transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to the mix. Well. Even though I felt nothing at the time, except tingling on my scalp, the morning after the two sessions, I felt it. You see, the area it was stimulating into activity is related to emotion and memory. And that’s what came through big time: bad memories and traumatic emotion. So I had meself a bit of a PTSD moment. The storm part lasted too many long minutes, but the fragile part has lasted days. I informed the ADD Centre soon after the memories were triggered, and we’re putting a moratorium on the tDCS for now. As I know from past experiences with medications and other therapies, I’m sensitive. It doesn’t take much dosage or acupuncture time or biofeedback to effect a result in me.
But as I told my neurodoc, I need to have my working memory and my long-term memory. The problem seems to be that when I work on that, these memories will come springing out like some evil jack in the box too. Clearly, I need to work on the PTSD more before we can return to the tDCS. So he had to do something. Time for history taking is over. It’s time for treatment. And so in a way, this awful experience was good. It made people sit up and finally take notice enough to help me. He did some sort of semi-hypnotic thing and said it would take a couple of days to take effect. In the past, I’ve done visualization exercises and other things I’ve forgotten. They’ve worked but not enough to prevent or resolve PTSD. I hope this is a good first step. In the meantime, the tDCS did seem to enhance the return of my photographic memory, in the short term anyway. And best of all, my parents sent me these cheery Spring flowers. They’re not only happy-making, they gave me a reason to pull out my camera and snap a few.
