I would say when I started college - when I was 16 or 17 - was when my speech first became affected, but even now, while it is certainly slower and more slurred than "normal", I don't have huge problems being understood. My speech only becomes very difficult to understand when I'm cold, tired or nervous. However speech is something I always really sruggled with, it wasn't so much the ataxia but controlling my breathing while speaking, especially in situations that make me nervous like when using the phone or meeting new people. I saw a speech therapist who gave me breathing exercises to do. The improvement I have seen has made a really big difference, knowing I can rely on my speech a lot more has really boosted my confidence. I still have good days and bad days, but on the whole my speech is more powerful and even than it has been in years.

Last year I started to suffer with depression. Following the recovery from my foot surgery and the problems I had leading up to my supapubic surgery I guess I reached my own personal limit - as lots of people do. Aside from that I have always suffered with anxiety and in situations that made me anxious my FA symptoms would be a lot worse - for example my speech on the phone would be a lot less clear because I was so anxious about not being understood. I started taking an antidepressant called Citanapram and it's made a big difference; not only do I not feel low and don't have to live with fear of slipping so low again but it's also addressed my anxiiety issues meaning that I'm far more relaxed and far less held back by some of my FA symptoms.

I have Nystagmus, which causes rapid and involuntary movements of the eyeball and just recently this has begun to affect my ability to focus, creating what I call flickery vision. Occasionally I'll be reading and my focus will skip back a few words etc. Although this isn't really a problem; it just slows me down a bit sometimes. My hearing is affected, but this is something you would never know unless you took me into a room where there is background noise (in class or in an office I can hear just fine). Because the nerves jumble things up, my ears mix up messages about what is foreground noise and what is background noise and I am left struggling to distinguish between the two. selectively

I have struggled with muscle spasm since I was a teenager. I have steadily increased the dose I take of a muscle relaxant called baclofen throughout the years and I experience a lot more muscle spasm when all I am very tired or I am ill. Like when I had flu about seven years ago – the spasm I experienced then was extreme and left me unable to use my legs at all for many months. I did exactly the one thing I shouldn’t of without knowing it – I rested my body completely. Experience has taught me that the best way to deal with muscle spasm is to exercise especially with movement lots of repetition so you learn how to voluntarily relax the muscle. Another great way to relax the muscles is with massage by taking up swimming.