EDITOR’S NOTE: Every Tuesday, noted Tourette Syndrome advocate Troye Evers shares his “52 Weeks of TS” blog journal with the TSParentsOnline community. With just ONE week remaining in this series, there’s a chance you missed one or more entries from his exciting, revealing journey. You can read all of them here. For more information about Troye, please click on his name or visit his website.
I have described my TS through analogies, poetry, honesty and fear, but the reality is that I have TS. I am Troye Evers and I have Tourette Syndrome. I don’t like my tics, but I’m going to own them. I don’t like my OCD, but I’m going to grasp it. It is an endless struggle, but it is part of me, it’s who I am. My TS has taught me so much, and helped me teach others.
It’s been about a week since I have stopped taking the Chinese herbs and I have not seen a change. Do I have to wait another four to six weeks for my tics to go back to normal, or am I stuck with these new tics? Out of everything that I have tried this year, the only thing that I have noticed to actually help is the fish oil.
I don’t regret anything that I’ve tried. It was all a learning experience. Therefore, something didn’t work for me. That’s the thing with TS; it is really about trial and error. Just because it did not work for me does not mean that it won’t work for someone else, but like 52 Weeks of TS, I think I’m near the end of my journey of trial and error. I could continue experimenting with different medications and other rumored helpful remedies or I can just accept what I was given. By accepting what I was given, I would make myself stronger.
As we venture deeper into the season, my OCD’s get worse. This is a normal thing, it happens every year. The media does not help me with this. The news is always reporting about how dirty and germ filled different places are. The other night they did a report on café’s and how germs are spread and how many there are. It’s really just gross. Do you realize how many people don’t wash their hands after going the bathroom? Then they will go to get their coffee and fill it up with milk. Now there is feces and urine on the milk that I’m about to put in my coffee. Just one more reason to never leave my apartment.
It’s things like this that makes my OCD and Germaphobia so bad. I don’t think I feed into it too much; it’s more the stupidity of other people. I walk around and watch people cough and sneeze all over the city with no cares of who’s around them. This week, I actually watched two examples of people’s stupidity like this. One was on my morning subway ride to work.
As I’ve already said, the subway ride is usually the hardest time of my day especially for my OCDs. One morning I was on the train and across from me was a mother with her son who was about three years old. I sat there and watched as the mother let her child climb all over the seats, then lay on the seats and put his feet all over the window. These feet that are all over the seats and windows are the same feet that have walked all over the city that is cover in bird feces, dog feces and rat feces.
This was not the end of it. After the little boy put his feet all over the window, he proceeded to get up, stand on the seat again and put his face and lips on the window that his feet were just on. The mother did nothing. Are you serious? It’s just absolutely disgusting. Now everything that your child has stepped in all over the city is now in his mouth. They soon got off the train and someone else sat down in the kid’s seat and rested his head on the dirty disease covered window. That poor unaware person.
This was not the only thing like this I saw this week. I also witnessed a woman walking down the street with a dead bloody pigeon. It looked as if the pigeon might have just been hit by a car, but really. Are you really just walking around carrying a dead pigeon with your bare hands? Pigeons are the most disgusting, disease-covered birds in NYC.
I’m not really fond of any birds, I think they are all gross, but pigeons are the top of that list. They eat anything, including garbage and I have even witnessed a pigeon eating a dead pigeon on the road. One of my friends and I used to call pigeons “rigeons” because they are rats with wings, and now this woman is walking around with it in her hand. The only question I have is, when is it going to be legal for me to walk around and spray strangers with my Lysol?
Yet I am still here, so I’m going to keep on keeping on. I have a bigger battle — educating people about Tourette Syndrome. Until next week, “I’ll tic to you later.”
