Morgellon’s, today… my response to a post
As someone with both the mental health and the physical promptings to end up a victim of this disease, let me tell you that there are three things that feed into this ailment:
You have to already be an anxious person, which is an easy problem to have.
You have to have sensations of insects crawling or digging in your skin, in particular locations, repetitively, which is easy to have if you’re working on diabetes or nervous system problems. One can also get it psychogenically.
You have to have little benign growths of the skin which when you pick at them seem to have filaments in them. They’re most likely keratoses of some kind.
Your anxiety makes you want to find a cause for the ‘formication’ (tactile hallucinations of insects crawling on you.) Then you start ‘really digging’ and you now are anxiously trying to get rid of your ‘bugs’.
When I’m lying in bed at night, feeling like I’m covered with crawling, biting insects, I remind myself that it isn’t real – it’s an artefact of my aging nervous system. Sometimes there’s a real insect in my bed, but they move – the places that my nervous system says I’m being bitten or crawled on DO NOT.
Please have sympathy for people with this ailment. It’s a bear to treat and it’s horrible to live with…. I have most of the symptoms but I don’t have the disease because I know I don’t have bugs.
Paul got eight bags of clothes out the door yesterday in preparation for packing. I am so proud of him I could explode. He still accused me of taking away his drivers licence and I didn’t get angry. I just walked him through what happened again and told him that he was doing the right thing.
You don’t stop loving people when they change – some people say you shouldn’t but that’s not right either. I’m having to change my behaviour and that’s okay, my parents modelled it for me. I know I’ll get downcast, upset, frustrated, sad. The work doesn’t care. And I wrote 850 words yesterday and it was glorious, and set like a pearl in the rest of my day.
