Hi, Marjorie ... if Rick ever has an emotional lability meltdown, you'll know.
First: both crying and raging are like nothing I have ever experienced before. This last one started with me screaming ... like in Hitchcock ... real screams (never done that before). In crying meltdowns (like at Kinko's when the clerk was so nice), it was shrieks at the top of my lungs. The whole mall went on lock down. Shrieking and sobbing and skrieking and sobbing. I was trying to get out of there as fast as possible before I got arrested, but you have NO CONTROL over this. Your body takes over. So I went shrieking through the store and the mall and the parking lot, with people slamming on their brakes, whirling around and staring at me. This was because a salesclerk was extra pleasant! The outbursts last about 40 to 45 minutes and I'm exhausted by it.
Your brain is not affected ... you're thinking furiously how to make it stop, and trying to get yourself to breathe. It is very much like the seizures I have had in the middle of the night, where my arms are flailing back and forth and my legs are jerking straight out ... and I can't make them stop! It is scary as hell to be "imprisoned" in a body out of control ... whether shrieks or flailing .... and not be able to stop it from happening.
When I got home from the Kinko's episode, still shrieking ... I'm talking top of my lungs here, Marjorie ... and my husband was wildly alarmed, I was able to type on my Light/Writer "Ignore me this is just the ALS again." But it really shakes up my husband (and everybody else I see). And me.
Emotional lability is not "normal emotion" expressed at an inappropriate time ... or an appropriate time. It is something I have never experienced in my life ... it is like being a wild animal, or insane? I don't know what to compare it to. My body has never made those noises before. And it cannot be controlled. You cannot stop screaming/shrieking and sobbing.
When it happened at the UCLA clinic, and I lunged at the doctor and she ran to get help, she clearly had the impression that I might do anything. And I feel the same way. I know once one of these starts it's not going to be over till its over and I have no control over it.
It's nothing like a "normal reaction" to frustrations, or having a "few choice words" with your spouse. Nothing. It's a different universe. I guess unless you've experienced it or seen it in action, you can't imagine it.
We had a thread going on Patients Like Me on this topic, and there were several others who have had these same intense episodes, and two of us agreed that it is something primordial ... it is coming from way, way down in the lizard brain somewhere.
This is why I feel I may have FTD also, or some sort of dementia trying to break through.
On the other hand, I'm in LA and the sun is shining and the daffodills will be up soon and I just had my carpets shampood and everything smells nice (even me) and ... and ....
Speechless in L.A. :lol: