I ran into a family friend from home today on campus and it reminded me that I never told anyone about my special disorder. She asked me what I was graduating in and I told her neuro-psychology and immediately she asked me if I had heard about Sensory Processing Disorder because her son had just been diagnosed with it. I told her not only had I heard about it, but that I myself had it.
This past summer while taking a class up at the Salt Lake Center, my professor diagnosed me with Sensory Integration or Sensory Processing Disorder. I felt like a light switch had been turned on in my head. All my little quirks were coming together and all made perfect sense. I just wish I had known this at 2...or even 12 and not finding out when I was 22. Sensory Integration Dysfunction is a disorder is hard to explain but it make it difficult to process information or sometimes over-processes information. For me it makes my hyper ticklish...like to the point where someone touches me lightly and I'm laughing. It makes me feel trapped in my shoes and its the reason why it is so uncomfortable for me to wear pants in bed.
Most of all it makes school very difficult for me.
On the spectrum of disabled people, I am lucky and have a lot of small insignificant symptoms and not a lot of the bigger more socially and mentally debilitating ones...at least I hope that I don't. Part of my symptoms is that my brain has trouble processing certain information that it should do automatically. Those functions that should happen automatically are supposed to be taken care of by your lower brain stem...but because my lower brain stem chooses not to process information correctly, other parts of my brain have to compensate. For example, take reading a book, or even just a paragraph. For most people its easy just follow the words on the page from left to right and understand the meaning of the words that you read. Its not hard. We do it all the time. Well for me, my lower brain stem does not want to do its part and follow the lines on the page. Because my higher processing areas in my brain have to kick in and take over this task, there is not a lot of brain power left to interpret or process anything that I just read. It takes all my focus just to follow the line on the page. I have to read things over and over and over again just to even understand what they are saying.
In doing my research on my disorder, and from what my professor taught our class, most kids with SID/SPD are thought to have lower intelligence when in fact they actually have a higher intelligence than most. My professor described it this way. He held up a piece of paper and folded it in half and said that this represented most people's intelligence. He then unfolded in paper and explained that because it took twice the amount of effort to do the same sort of tasks, and because I was functioning at such a high level, that my intelligence was much higher than average. He said that to be getting the grades I was getting at the university I am attending was phenomenal. I was shocked! I was never the smart one in my family; it always took me much longer understand new concepts at school so to have someone tell me that there was something out of my control making that happen really put me at ease.
I asked what I could do to help my problem and amazingly enough he told me that the best thing I could do was to swim. The man had no idea about my background and I told him that it was funny that he should say that because I had been swimming competitively since I was 6 years old. He then went on to tell me that swimming was the reason why I was at BYU and doing so well. I guess I will keep swimming.
Its funny how those experiences are put in your life for a reason. I'm grateful that there is someone who knows me even better than I know myself and knows all the we are in need of. I'm grateful to understand that those things don't just happen by coincidence but that they are planned out and for our benefit.
