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elfsSometimes I don't trust my extended ADHD diagnosis. I suspect my doc took a look at my intake essays and descriptions, saw the sex, the religious questioning, and all the writing, and said, "That's not ASD, that's Interictal Syndrome!"
The description of Interictal Syndrom is so vague as to be useless:
Some interictal patients don't even have seizures... they just have a constant, ongoing storm in a temporal lobe that causes those "symptoms." Despite their low resolution, PET scans clearly show such a storm in my left temporal lobe (the "ADHD" one) instead of the right (the "sex and whatever" one).
I suspect the extended diagnosis is a failure. He was an older man and burdened with prejudices. He's retired now. I don't know if I want a re-diagnosis; I get to have something in common with my wife (We're both epileptics now? Cool!) and there's something ticklishly delightful about having an "obscure" diagnosis, especially one with the promise of so much havoc behind it.
Then I remember that TempleOS's Terry Davis was THE poster boy for Interictal syndrome, and maybe I rethink that. Terry was a sad victim of his syndrome. He was a brilliant programmer who wrote an interesting DOS-shell, then claimed it had been dictated by God, was viciously racist and sexist and hated sex itself in all its forms, and harassed anyone who told him TempleOS wasn't that great.
But I'm clearly NOT Terry Davis, and the general diagnosis is good enough to give me access to a psychiatric neurologist and the medications I need to keep a job I actually like and that actually pays well, and doesn't (quite so often) drive my wife crazy.
The description of Interictal Syndrom is so vague as to be useless:
A distinct syndrome of interictal behavior changes occurs in many patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. These changes include alterations in sexual behavior, religiosity, and a tendency toward extensive, and in some cases compulsive, writing and drawing.
Some interictal patients don't even have seizures... they just have a constant, ongoing storm in a temporal lobe that causes those "symptoms." Despite their low resolution, PET scans clearly show such a storm in my left temporal lobe (the "ADHD" one) instead of the right (the "sex and whatever" one).
I suspect the extended diagnosis is a failure. He was an older man and burdened with prejudices. He's retired now. I don't know if I want a re-diagnosis; I get to have something in common with my wife (We're both epileptics now? Cool!) and there's something ticklishly delightful about having an "obscure" diagnosis, especially one with the promise of so much havoc behind it.
Then I remember that TempleOS's Terry Davis was THE poster boy for Interictal syndrome, and maybe I rethink that. Terry was a sad victim of his syndrome. He was a brilliant programmer who wrote an interesting DOS-shell, then claimed it had been dictated by God, was viciously racist and sexist and hated sex itself in all its forms, and harassed anyone who told him TempleOS wasn't that great.
But I'm clearly NOT Terry Davis, and the general diagnosis is good enough to give me access to a psychiatric neurologist and the medications I need to keep a job I actually like and that actually pays well, and doesn't (quite so often) drive my wife crazy.
