Tightrope Pt. 3C; sensory integration

Say you are eating a nice, juicy hamburger. You may be enjoying the burger, but you are also attending to your spouse & instructing your children on proper restaurant behavior, perhaps, or admiring a nearby sex object, or thinking about a problem at work. Suddenly you bite down on a piece of bone. Suddenly, when your teeth connect with that bit of bone, the hamburger gets your undivided attention. Your brain instantly informs you that there is something very wrong with your hamburger. Perhaps you spit out the mouthful of food immediately, reflexively (impolitely, but hey, we are talking survival here!) This is a variation on the "flight" response -- getting away from the stimulus that falls outside your parameters for safety. Or perhaps you go to the cash register to raise hell -- a form of "fight" response. Perhaps you attempt to unobtrosively remove the bit of bone, verify that it is nothing more alarming, & stoicly continue to eat. (Our conscious mind & social conditioning inform our responses to sensory information.) But one way or another, your sensory apparatus trips an alarm, & you respond to it.

The brain has an AMAZING capacity to adapt. Back in the Dark Ages, when I was in college, Psychology classes used to study experiments in which subjects were fitted with glasses that inverted everything in the visual field. At first, the students were disoriented & could hardly function. But at some point, the brain figured out that it could flip the imates upright. After having the students go around like this for some time, the nasty researchers then took away the glasses -- & the students got disoriented all over again, & had to wait for their brain to flip the images back to normal. (And, in fact, this is part of the flexibility I was talking about. When conditions change, the brain adapts as a matter of survival. The brain determinedly struggles to wrestle meaning from the constant, overwhelming flow of data. And fortunately for us, the brain is pretty darned good at doing that.)

Now, Chester's brain has been through rather a lot in the past year or so. First the tumor came along & started disrupting the normal neurological patterns in his brain. And then the surgeon came along & caused even more changes. (While I don't know a lot about such things, it is quite possible that the scar tissue caused yet more changes, & I don't even want to speculate on what the chemo & radiation might have done. That is WAY too far outside my experience.) This has all, quite understandably, produced changes in the way he processes sensory information.

For example, he was going through a box of things from his previous apartment, & discovered that he can no longer tolerate the shampoo that he used to use. Its scent bothers him. He says that his sense of smell has become doglike in its intensity. For the most part, he seems to be comfortable with natural odors like sweat, although he has trouble with garbage smells, & asks his companion to take the trash out every night. He is having more trouble with chemical odors (so Dawn rewashed her clothes when she arrived, to remove the smell of the soap or fabric softener that was bothering him.) If you are going to visit him & are thinking about spritzing on a little something to improve your smell, he might prefer to smell your sweat. (His reactions to some odors may border on a mild allergic reaction. Allergies & sensory processing issues tend to run in the same families, & are related in some strange way I haven't figured out. When my son had a course of neurodevelopmental movement therapy to address his sensory processing issues, his food allergies/sensitivities also disappeared -- which his therapist claims is not uncommon... Nearly every book I read on ADD/autism made reference to allergies, & a naturopath I consulted described autism & allergy as different kinds of inflammation in the body... There is a relationship, even though I cannot yet adequately explain it.)