It took me years to outgrow my tics— and even longer to recover emotionally
As Told to Mindel Kassorla
ITall began one morning as I was getting ready for preschool. I made a small sniffing noise. Then I did it again. And again. And I wasn’t sick.
“Noa, stop that,” my mom said.
“Stop what?”
At first, I didn’t even realize I was making a sniffing sound. Even when I started noticing my incessant “sniff,” “sniff,” I couldn’t stop myself.
That was scary enough. Then my mother told me that if the sniffing didn’t go away, we’d have to go to the doctor. To me, that was a terrifying threat. But still, I couldn’t control it. A few days later, mom said we were “going for ice cream” — code for “going to the doctor.”
Sniffing, I soon learned, was just the first form of my many tics. Over the years, my tics morphed into twitching, blinking, and head shaking. Whenever a new tic appeared, I was forced to swallow a horrific medication called Azithromycin, an antibiotic commonly used to treat strep throat, among other conditions. I tried all sorts of tricks to get it down but sometimes it took me over an hour just to finish the nasty pink stuff.
Create a free account to keep reading.
