An important lesson was learned yesterday. Yesterday was my first session of my second round of TMS, which was fine. There was a lot of talk about “dosing” and “intensities” but what it comes down to is, they’re zapping the left side of my brain a little longer this time. I think. I once again reassure both myself and my audience that there is good science behind it. The truth is, though, even the people who do it still don’t know exactly what it does or why it works. But it does.
The difficulty began when I decided I should go out shopping immediately after I got back. The shopping took considerably longer than expected and I ended up being out of the house for 4-5 hours1 which, it turns out, does not work for me. Or at least it didn’t yesterday. I’m not sure exactly what I did in between when we got home and when I went to bed, which was about 8pm, but I slept for almost 12 hours with no significant interruptions.
Okay, I can already hear people saying “WTF did you mean by ‘does not work’, sport?” so I’ll try to provide a little more detail. I have, in the past, described the situation as being like needing to go to the bathroom. You can be walking around and you’ll get that little kick from your bladder that says “start thinking about me”. This, as we all know, is not urgent and you can ignore it. If you ignore it for long enough, there comes a point when you don’t really have a lot of choice in the matter, you have to go. Many2 people will not have allowed things to get to that point, which is good, but you can imagine. So there came a point yesterday when I had to go and I kind of couldn’t. So I pushed through. I didn’t do anything awful or inappropriate3 but I really can’t remember a lot of detail about the rest of the day and it became pretty obvious that I wasn’t thinking clearly at times.
I did get home safe and sound and, as mentioned above, after sleeping for nearly 12 hours I even feel better. I am still much more physically tired than I would have expected but most of my brain is back on line.
Small steps.
- Which is not as long as I would have guessed. I’m basing this off when I left the house and semi-cloudy recollection of when we got back and if I had guessed I would have said it was 6-8 hours. ↩︎
- I worked in an emergency room for a long time. I know not everyone has lost control of their bladder at some point but the number who have may be higher than you think. ↩︎
- Except possibly being very disagreeable company for my wife. I’ll have to ask. ↩︎
I imagine that Matt on Autopilot is remarkably similar to Matt in Real Life, if the observer is among the uninitiated. You’ve been fronting effectively for years (decades?), so I’m sure it’s nearly as autonomic as, say, keeping your sphincters tightened. You’re not going to fool anyone who really knows you, but then again, there’s no longer any need to.