When Left became Right

When Left became Right, right?

In the 2011 I had the most peculiar thing happen. Such a slight and odd thing happened that I didn’t even notice it. Not right away.

Such a distinct odd little thing that one might even blame it on migraine auras which I certainly had an abundance of. When I noted this thing I did indeed blame it on auras.

Now, of course, I wonder if this was one of my first Multiple Sclerosis (MS) indicators given it was around the time of the ‘incident of the numb right hand’. Where my right hand went numb and didn’t recover for months

Essentially, Left became Right, Right became Left, verbally but not physically.

By that I mean every time I would say left I meant right and vice versa but when I pointed left I mean left. So if I point left and say ‘Turn right’, I meant ‘turn left’. You can see how this might confuse some people. And I do apologize to those people I gave backwards directions to and did not realize it until afterwards. Yes, indeed, I do feel they all ended up in England or Constantinople via a time machine mishap wrong turn or something equally unrealistic. That is how wrong those directions were.

I worked at the bank back then. I did in fact give a lot of people directions. And I did actually come to realize this little quirk this way one day when I was outside pointing the right way, saying the wrong word. Then rapidly became aware of it after that when in the car, as the passenger navigator, pointing the right way and again saying the wrong word. So often that I realize this was a permanent thing in my brain and not a migraine fluctuation.

Unfortunately, I automatically say the wrong one without thinking. Now that I know it is permanently backwards if I happen to be giving directions I literally have to move my right hand, remind myself mentally that I am right-handed, and then say the word right or left. It is the weirdest thing. Like a pause. Slightly moving my right hand. My brain goes ‘Yes, yes, that is indeed my right hand, I am indeed right handed, oh, yes, that is indeed the right, so I will say right now.’

MS hypothesis: left parietal lobe

My hypothesis this is due to MS lesions is simply due to the specific lesions that I have and their relation to language.

CHAT GPT analysis

‘This type of error is a classic sign of dysfunction in the left parietal lobe, particularly a region called the angular gyrus or the nearby supramarginal gyrus.

• The Left Parietal Lobe is dominant for language, mathematical operations, and spatial cognition, including the understanding of right and left.
• The Angular Gyrus is a major association area that acts as a critical hub. It integrates information from our visual, auditory, and sensory systems to form abstract concepts and link them to words.

Your MRI Report explicitly mentions:

“There is a radially oriented periventricular lesion in the left posterior frontoparietal region (9 mm in diameter). Left parietal periventricular 4 mm lesion.”

This is a direct match. A lesion in this left parietal region could easily cause the exact symptom you are describing. It is disrupting the neural pathway that retrieves the correct verbal label (“left”) for the well-understood spatial concept.’

What I find fascinating with Chat GPT is that you can specifically put in your lesions to link them to specific symptoms associated with those lesions. Isolating that data with Google can be frustrating. Taken with a grain of salt of course and cross referenced with Google.

Either way, it is interesting to note that Left can indeed become Right, Right can become Left due to a classic dysfunction in the left parietal lobe

According to My MS Team the parietal lobes in particular are associated with plenty of things, like touch and movement, but also important for reading and doing math and can lead to the forgetting of words for common things.

My first MS symptom Substack

MS diagnosis