Hi, jeffrapp (@jeffrapp)

My drinking preceded my PN by decades. Like many, I started drinking when I was in high school, on the sly, of course, although 18 was legal in NYC at that time. Then I drank through my undergrad and army days, straight through my grad school days, and into a career in the theater, which only accelerated my drinking. How many drinks daily or weekly? I'm honestly not sure. I was in a hard-drinking crowd, especially in the theater (never before or during a performance). I finally quit in the late '80s or early '90s. At the time, I had no PN symptoms. If I had PN at the time, it was well hidden. My earliest recollections of brief episodes of balance weirdness date back to the 2010s ('10, '12, ''15) when I first experienced what were probably signs of developing PN. Those episodes grew more troubling (unsteadiness on stage made me give up acting in 2019), but it wasn't until the summer of 2022 that I saw a neurologist and got my PN diagnosis. What made me curious about a possible link between my long-ago drinking was a passing mention by a neurology nurse of a "shadow" on a brain MRI (nothing to worry about, she said) that might be a residue of my drinking days. I don't give it lots of thought, but every now and then, I'll find myself wondering, "Mmm, might those years of drinking have planted a timebomb in my nervous system––a PN bomb that has only exploded in more recent years?" I suspect there's no surefire answer to that question.

Ray (@ray666)