I have restless leg syndrome. Big whoop. It does not hurt or impair my abiility to use my legs. Contrary to how it has been portrayed in comedic circles, it does not cause me to spontaneously high-kick or involunutarily kick the cats. It is not Tourette's of the legs. In fact, restless leg syndrome is actually a misnomer as the sensations are not restricted to the legs. It was not something I talked about because it was not a "real thing" until I saw a commercial about RLS six/seven years ago.
Last night was particularly bad. Bad is relative; I got little sleep Sunday night and maybe an hour's sleep last night in five to ten minute increments. So I spent the night bouncing around in my own head and eventually mulling over the first time I was aware something was not right. I was five years old and like many children at that age, I was reluctant to go to bed. There were bugs in my bed, or so I told my mum. It was the only explanation my young mind had for the creepy-crawly sensation I felt when under the covers at night. Of course there were no bugs in my bed. Mum pulled the bed clothes off my bed to show me. I was told it was merely the linens settling around my legs and to stop being difficult and go to sleep. I was told in that way that meant bugs in my bed would be the least of my concerns if I did not stop making up stories to avoid bedtime. This was also the first I remember losing sleep for multiple nights in a row; the start of my insomnia. I never again spoke about the twitchy legs until eight years ago when I sheepishly mentioned it to K.
By the time I was in third grade I was getting phantom pains in my limbs. An arm or a leg would start to hurt for no reason and the pain would last for at least ten minutes to an hour or so. Someone told me it was just growing pains and perfectly normal. It was another year or so before I figured out that "growing pains" was just adult-speak for "all in the kid's head". That was when I stopped mentioning the pains. It was also when I learned not to make a fuss over little pains or even acknowledge any sort of ailment unless it was obvious and debilitating. This was the reason last year I brushed off what seemed a minor sinus infection until it resulted in a ruptured cornea. I still get the phantom pains, maybe a couple of times a year, and found out that they are another symptom of Willis-Ekbom disease/RLS.
In my mother's defense, there would have been nothing to find had she taken me to a doctor all those years ago. There is nothing to observe unless one is being monitored by certain machinery at the exact moment the sensations occur. Doctors only figured out RLS existed about twenty years ago and there is little understood about it after two decades. That is still no excuse for how my mother chose to react to the situation. I bring this up because some of our members are now parents or will be soon. Kids say the darndest things and many of those things are complete fabrications. But not every preposterous tale is made up, some are merely misinterpreted.
-m.
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Originally Posted by Mercy
