Vignette Interview Transcript - Tourette's

Interviewer – Could you tell us how your Tourette’s first developed?

Paul Levy - My Tourette’s developed when I was younger, about two, three years ago, it started off as a little head twitch that’s nothing massive, its not like I woke up and started shouting slurs or anything, and it slowly progressed into something a lot harder than that, so it started off as a small twitch and then it would start with my head going further back or further forward. Eventually after a few months down the line I was in a car crash and it wasn’t bad but like I hit my head and everything. I had whiplash and progressively after that it kind of developed into verbal slurs. 

Interviewer - What does it feel like physically when you have a twitch?

Paul Levy – When I have a twitch its like a rising feeling, like a rising sickening feeling from the lower back that rises up behind my head and then throws my head backwards and just makes me say something. You can compare it to a sneeze, like when you sneeze you hold it in it’s going to hurt. When I twitch it’s like a feeling that rises to the back of my head and then I release said what ever it is. To twitch is actually quite painful because its hit you hard at the back of your head. Like someone jolting the back of your head forward.

One time I sat my A level’s. I wasn’t diagnosed but I was twitching at the time. I had no idea what it was and when it came to actually sitting the exam I was twitching and I was holding it in and I threw up during the exam, and I had to leave twenty minutes early, I didn’t get the grades I needed to get into university, I ended up getting AAB.