Twenty years ago, for me, I began writing “The Story” in my mind. The main characters of “The Story,” John and then Trisha now Trishna, appeared as I was leaving high school and haven’t left me since. “Novel 01” started on a whim, with a two-week research period before a four-week writing period. “Novel 02” is now in its 43rd month of brainstorming. I haven’t dedicated much time to this, mainly because it’s been 13 months with FND.

Major spoilers after the jump.

That Functional Neurological Disorder website is underwhelming but that’s the most we have.

“Novel 02” first started out as an exploration of anxiety through my own experiences with what I had been diagnosed with as “anxiety” but was closer to being labeled as “derealization” from a psychologist years later, but, with the caveat that the label would be rough to determine without clinical notes or proximity to the event. That event was traumatic enough to where it was difficult for me to sort it out, but I did in time.

It’s been about thirteen months now since my FND diagnosis.

In those past thirteen months, I’ve learned a lot about myself and about FND. The most I’ve learned from FND were not from the under-educated doctor that had diagnosed me, with no real offense toward them, there is just no real medical information out there. It’s only now in this current generation of doctors that medical professionals are learning about FND, and only through its context with conversion disorder.

I’ve learned about FND through not a medical professional strictly.

Rather, a friend of mine’s dad was a psychologist by education and had researched into conversion disorder, and with that level of understanding, had the insight into where FND is now – and the biggest hurdle that patients need to overcome regarding FND is to have the frankly inhumane doctors and medical professionals do the impossible of believing that FND is real. As I talked through in the video portion that includes this live-writing of this essay, with even thirteen months of distance from this event, I still experience many volumes of mental trauma from my experiences with getting my diagnosis.

Sammohini will have it significantly easier with “Novel 02.”

In part because if I outlined my experiences, well, I might as well write an autobiography, and if I were to lean closer to my own experiences, then no reader would believe how my experiences were. No reader would believe me when I would explain that I was not fed one evening because the nurses assumed I could feed myself, when FND as I have it involves limb paralysis. Paralysis being an offensive term by one medical professional that claimed that FND is not paralysis because of some technical term for paralysis whereas the FND doctors who outlined the diagnosis officially call the limb numbness “paralysis.” So, it is with this level of hostility and unprofessional attitudes and inhumane perspectives on patients that I, as Zombiepaper, will dedicate my life as best I can to writing “Novel 02,” so that way I can free myself of these experiences.

These traumatic events will not consume my thoughts in vulnerable moments like this.

I will still have these feelings, and they won’t lessen with time. I will probably, at best, learn to cope with these experiences that I’ve had. I just hope that others will benefit from my experiences. By abstracting what I experienced and throwing that at Sammohini to experience, and then experiencing it through her perspective and through more objective perspectives in “Novel 02,” my hope is that I shock enough of the medical community into figuring out what the hell they’re going to do with some filthy patient writing about the medical condition that has the common uniting theme where every patient has this exact experience.

How will they explain that with a novel of this caliber?