Newbie Here!

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Joined: 6 Jan 2012
Age: 39
Gender: Male
Posts: 116

07 Jan 2012, 9:29 am

Hello all!!

My name is Jayne, and I am really glad I found this community.

I have a perinatal hypoxia-induced somatic injury to the right hemisphere of the brain. While that is not an autism-spectrum disorder, many of the symptoms are similar or the same, owing to the fact that the lobes of the brain that control things like social interactions are on the right side. Intelligence is seemingly unaffected. My symptoms are:

Attention: difficulty concentrating on a task and paying attention for more than a few minutes at a time. Doing more than one thing at a time may be difficult or impossible. This makes school a beast for me.

Memory: problems remembering information, such as street names or important dates, and learning new information easily. My longterm memory is amazing, short term can also be extremely good, but names and dates....

Orientation: difficulty recalling the date, time, or place. The individual may also be disoriented to self, meaning that he/she cannot correctly recall personal information, such as birth date, age, or family names. I have trouble with spacial relations and where I am relative to my environment

Organization: trouble telling a story in order,giving directions, or maintaining a topic during conversations. this particular symptom pisses of my family

Reasoning: difficulty interpreting abstract language, such as metaphors, or responding to humor appropriately.

Social communication (pragmatics): problems understanding nonverbal cues and following the rules of communication (e.g., saying inappropriate things, not using facial expressions, talking at the wrong time).

Ambisinistrality: Because it requires more oxygen, the dominant hemisphere of the brain is the one that is affected by brief hypoxia. In my case, I was right-brain dominant, which is left-handed. Unfortuantely, the damage affected my motor cortex and I am ambisinister- that is, both of my hands are as skilled as a right-hander's left.

Stemming: Boy do I stem. As a kid I used to clap and jump in people's faces :roll: Now I spin in circles in a chair to music (embarrassing as hell) and flick paper. I make "flickers", which are sheets of magazine subscription-card variety paper about 5 inches long and an inch across, and flick them. I do not stem in public, but it takes up a lot of time at home, and I really hope I can quit it one day.

I have learned to compensate for many of these things, but it is still a super hard endeavour to come off as "normal".