I wrote recently about how aging sucks, and various factors of my body slowly falling apart.

This trend has continued but I've made some nice strides in figuring out what's been going on.

So let me lay out some health issues:

• Muscle twitching in my eye, various places around my body, and recently mostly in the back of my wrist.
• Long term, an above average number of fairly severe headaches in my
• Grinding and cracking around my shoulders and neck, always uncomfortable

Go to the doctor!!!

I hear you say. Yeah yeah, I will when I feel it's necessary.

Generally, if things get worse, that's when I see a good reason to go. And to be honest, this is basically what doctors have told me the majority of the time in the past. 'Keep an eye on it and see me if there's any developments'.

So what's up with me? A review:

Twitching

Asking around the internet like reddit forums, chat GPT, and more legit places like NHS websites and research papers, twitching like this is almost always benign, but it does of course come with the panic attack that is ALS!!!!!!! Possibly the single worst disease known to man - this is what Stephen Hawking had.

For all intents and purposes, it has a 100% death rate, no cure, no expected cure over the horizon, and generally you'll be dead in 2-5 years. Hawking managed to survive partly because it kicked in so early (mostly happens between 40-70 years), and partly because they just invaded him with surgery and various intensive life support.

So what would the point in a doctor even be at this point other than confirmation?

So when you have something going on with your body and this 'ALS' keeps popping up, it's hard not to panic.

You see, my twitching is clearly not normal. Around the body, lasting for weeks? If more like normal, occasional twitching, it would just be chalked up to anxiety, stress, caffeine, lack of sleep.

But there is an alternative called BFS 'Benign Fasciculation Syndrome', which is, as it says, benign and basically just annoying. It can last weeks, months or years before it goes away.

I mean... if that's as bad is at gets, go for it lol. I can learn to love it.

But I must admit, I started getting a little panicky just because the internet info was so unreliable and inconsistent. But I found a bunch of legit researchers and major players in the ALS field discussing it and it certainly calmed my nerves.

ALS's primary signifier is the degeneration of muscles, so for the most part, you expect weakness and atrophy of muscles, which, as a result of that, muscle twitching occurs. And the weakness has to be a 'clinical weakness', as in, you're unable to button up shirts or type smoothly as I currently am.

This means that if one has twitching but no notable loss of muscle, it's basically not ALS. BFS in contrast has nothing to do with degeneration of muscles and is just an annoyance.

Knowing this, I've become hyper sensitive about checking whether or not my muscles are dying off, or my ability to hold things is falling apart, just in case I'm one of the rare cases of people under 40 who experience twitching first, which may or may not be possible.

But this really is the danger of self-diagnosis. I've noticed I've become hyper-aware of things that I'm pretty sure have always been there which I just never bothered thinking about until now. And now they're suddenly problematic because the internet says so.

I found myself looking in the mirror at my arms and comparing sizes, seeing if one has atrophied more than the other.

Just go to the doctor!!

I mean, I will, if I start to detect any muscle weakness. Honestly, I don't have much faith even in the private care in this country. They dismissed my wife's eczema in a way that clearly expressed the skin specialist's obvious lack of knowledge about eczema. When I visited about my concerns about hearing loss, they said my hearing is perfectly fine, bye. Even though my left ear clearly isn't perfectly fine.

So, I don't want to waste my time if I don't need to.

But if anything, the problem seems to be very, very slowly fading away.

So if it's not ALS...

What is it??

As I said it COULD be BFS, and if it continues much longer I'll certainly get that confirmed by the docs. But I suspect it's something else.

Posture

My posture has always been terrible. And I paid the consequences a few years ago when I ended up with 3 herniated discs and spent a week agonizing in bed, with the rest of my life precariously balancing myself around that injury.

But I sure did improve my lower back posture from that day forth lol. Before then, I actually found it exhausting to sit upright. My hunch was necessary. But now, to this day, I find sitting up right more comfortable than my original slouch. I didn't even know the muscles could hold me up indefinitely like this.

However, my upper posture is still awful: Shoulder, neck, head. I tend to lurch forwards at my laptop screen, being tall and all that.

It turns out that poor posture can directly lead to the exact kind of headaches I've been getting over the years, fairly intense, pressure headaches from the base of my neck going up into my skull. It never really occurred to me, as obvious as it might seem in hindsight. I just thought I didn't drink enough water.

The crackling and grinding in that area is pretty obviously bad posture, too.

What about the twitching? Well I haven't dived too deep into the research but it seems that there are two spinal discs, C6 and C5, located around that exact area of the neck, which when mistreated with bad posture, can mess with the nerve that goes directly down my arm to my wrist and thumb, which is exactly where it's affecting me (my thumb twitches a little alongside the wrist muscle).

Perhaps it's no surprise then that the last few days of effort improving my posture has seemingly helped the twitching to subside a bit.

It's not certain yet - it doesn't explain the eye twitching and various other parts that did happen for a while, but I certainly need to deal with this for my headaches and crackling joints of an old man regardless.

If I really do have BFS then... thank fuck lol. I'd take 200x the amount of twitching over ALS. I'll be one big bag of twitching, if that was the trade.

Mortality

I do think about death a lot. I don't obsess in fear about it, but the older I get the more it pops into my mind. Statistically, death is out to get us at every possible frickin turn.

Even though ALS is considered 'very rare', 3 per 100,000 people get it. That's still like 90,000 people per year worldwide!!

Then you have to add that to all the other bags of tricks life throws at you: Diabetes, alzheimer's (arguably even more terrifying), every cancer, heart attacks, strokes, 'acts of god', infections & viruses.

No matter how rare, they add up to mean there's a pretty damn good chance you're gonna die soon, one way or the other. It's pretty miraculous we've managed to grow to such massive population numbers in spite of it all.

These scares really do help me appreciate what I have, and to work on improving it. There's absolutely nothing I can do to prevent something like ALS, but I can push back a lot of the others, and I can make the most of the time I have while I'm still good to go.

Speaking of things that have to go, my bad posture is about to say bye bye.