Jonola14

TOURETTES REWIRED

There wasn’t much on television last Monday night, so I let it blare away while I sat in front of my computer to write some emails.

But then I found myself concentrating more and more on the programme that was currently being aired. It was about the brain disease, Tourettes. For those of you that don’t know about Tourettes, it’s the one where the sufferer has brain ticks that cause him/her to swear out loud or shout insults at people. They usually also suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder and as a result of their disease, quite often they get depression too. It’s really not a nice thing to have and none of us can have the remotest idea what suffering from Tourettes can be like.

During the programme, this particular sufferer was getting worse. He’d been given extended leave of absence from work for abusive language, was getting increasingly depressed and had developed a tendency to rip all his clothes.

Now, a lot of people think Tourettes is funny. Outrageous public swearing - funny, I imagine, because it’s outside the realm of normality. Taboo, in a way. But what if they had Tourettes themselves, I don’t think they’d find it funny then?

We saw footage of the man walking around the supermarket with his wife, shouting “stupid nigger” at fellow shoppers and “fucking bitch” at his wife and this after he’d mown his lawn three times that day thanks to his OCD. Something had to be done to help him battle the disease and the solution was to insert thin metal rods into his brain to alter its chemical make-up, the only thing being that he had to remain awake, fully conscious, while the operation was carried out.

His head was clamped against the operating chair to stop his ticks from jerking his head and sending the metal rod into the middle of his brain. He’d only had a local anaesthetic, so he was fully aware of what was going on around him. The doctor approached with a drill in his hand, the narrator explained that a hole would be drilled in the man’s head to allow the rods to be inserted and then a plug installed to literally plug the gap.

The camera panned out to a frontal view, the doctor spun the drill and the whirring resounded loudly in the operating theatre. The patient sat there, wide awake, scared out of his wits as the sharp drill bit cut into the top of his head and knowing that he may not come out alive. Then the Tourettes took over once more and I fell off my chair laughing. He shouted:

“BLACK AND DECKER!”