This is a companion to My Health. In October 2026 I gathered every record I could find, from May 2024 to now, and set them against the analysis on that page: my body through the Hartman, Hallinan and PRI lenses, my mind, my situation, and the world around me. I’ve left out the names of the clinicians and practices. Where something is my interpretation rather than what a record says, I say so. I put this together with Claude, an AI assistant.
For everything I’ve done to get help over these eighteen months, and where the system hasn’t helped, see What I’ve done to get help.
The short version
- The main claim on my health page holds up: this is how my body is organized, not broken structure. Every exam that looked for damage came back normal: two ENT exams, a camera exam of my throat, the MRIs and a nerve test. Every exam that looked at how things move found real restriction: two speech-language pathologists and my physical therapist’s measurements. That split explains a lot of why I’ve felt dismissed. A clinic looking for damage writes “normal”, while my problem is tension and coordination.
- The holding pattern started before the deadlift. In May 2024, eleven months before the injury, a test found my pelvic floor not releasing properly and a weak squeeze. My tongue tie is lifelong, my asthma is from childhood, and my one strong eye goes back to grade school. The injury, and then 2026, landed on a body that was already braced.
- My anxiety scores follow my circumstances. On the GAD-7, a standard anxiety questionnaire, they went from 0 in January 2024 to 13 after the injury, down to 5–9 in early 2026, then up to 15, severe, in September 2026, when everything piled up at once.
- The question of hypomania came up in the most extreme week of my year, after weeks of about four hours’ sleep a night, heavy caffeine, changes in what I was taking, and the most pressure I’ve been under. A few weeks of real rest will tell the two readings apart.
- The world is measurably hard right now, and especially for someone in my position. Job growth stalled in September 2026, real wages fell, and consumer sentiment is near a record low. Gas has been over $4 for much of the year, and I drive between four cities. The main federal fellowship for PhD students no longer accepts second-year students like me, and hiring for junior engineers is far below 2019 levels.
My records, in order
| Date | Who | What they found | What they recommended | Done? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 2024 | A gastroenterology lab, testing bowel control | A weak squeeze (208 mmHg, where 240–300 is normal for men). My pelvic floor didn’t release properly when pushing, though the overall result was called inconclusive. | A third test, an MRI defecography | Scheduled for June 2024; I put it on hold when my symptoms improved, and the planned re-evaluation never happened |
| Nov 2025 | A speech-language pathologist in Massachusetts | Suspected posterior tongue tie: moderate-to-severe difficulty raising and lowering my tongue, a new lisp, my tongue feeling shifted left, some drooling on the right | ENT and neurology | Both done in October 2026 |
| Dec 2025 | A psychiatrist reviewing my chart (not an exam) | Chronic anxiety, worse since the back injury. “Doesn’t display any features concerning for mania.” | Therapy; medication only if needed | Therapy under way |
| Jan 2026 | Neck MRI | Mild narrowing where the nerves exit at C3–C4; nothing pressing on the cord or nerves | None | — |
| Jan 2026 | An ENT at my local hospital | “Normal head and neck examination.” My tongue’s mobility was “normal to my estimation.” “No pain or other symptoms to suggest” a jaw joint problem. | Speech-language pathology | Done four days later |
| Jan 2026 | A speech-language pathologist at the same hospital | A tongue tie, restricted in every direction; I can’t lift my tongue without moving my jaw. My jaw quivers and hurts when I stick my tongue out. My voice box sits high, with little space between the hyoid and thyroid cartilage, and a lot of stiffness around it. Bony growths on my palate. Gum recession. Possible muscle-tension voice problem. | A specialist in tongue ties, airway and jaw; a surgeon there who releases tongue ties; a scope of my throat before voice therapy | I held off then; the scope was done in October |
| Mar 2026 | Retina specialists | X-linked retinoschisis (XLRS), right eye worse, with the right eye’s field narrowed | Routine follow-up | — |
| Apr 2026 | An airway-focused dental practice (CBCT) | Narrowest airway 132.6 mm²; nasal valve collapse marked on the left; C2 rotated 18° sitting up | Airway care | Ongoing |
| Sep 2026 | MRIs of brain, neck and mid-back | Small disc bulges, nothing pressing on the cord or nerves; C2 rotation about 5° lying flat | A lumbar MRI | Booked |
| Oct 2026 | Nerve test (EMG), right side | Normal | — | — |
| Oct 2026 | A second ENT at the same hospital | Throat camera exam normal; vocal cords normal. Nasal valves “well supported”, no collapse. My jaw joints slip out of place easily, a little tender, left more than right. A shortened tongue frenulum, though releasing it may not fix everything. Possibly a sleep disorder, not clearly apnea. | A swallow study; an overnight sleep study in a lab; a jaw specialist; a hearing test for new ringing in my ears | Swallow study booked; the rest not yet |
| Oct 2026 | Emergency department psychiatry | Logical, organized thinking; good insight and judgment; no psychosis; no mania or hypomania, now or in the past. One screening questionnaire positive, one negative. | Outpatient therapy and psychiatry | Under way |
| Oct 2026 | My therapist | Elevated energy and pressured speech; a mood that read as anxious, low and hypomanic; logical, goal-directed thinking; insight intact | Psychiatry, to discuss mood stabilizers | Under way |
Body: what the records change in my analysis
| What My Health says | What the records add | Where that leaves it |
|---|---|---|
| This is how my body is organized, not broken structure | Exams looking for damage came back normal: ENT twice, the throat camera exam, the MRIs, the nerve test. Exams looking at how things move found restriction: both speech-language pathologists, my PT’s measurements. | Strongly supported. It also explains why I keep hearing “normal”. |
| Hartman’s “end game” compression (almost no rotation anywhere, glutes and adductors clamping) | Signs of a braced body at both ends of the trunk. At the jaw: bony growths on the palate, gum recession, grinding, a jaw that quivers. At the throat: a high voice box, little room between the hyoid and thyroid cartilage, stiffness around it. At the pelvic floor in 2024: not releasing, a weak squeeze. | Supported, and it reaches further than I’d described. My interpretation: a trunk that braces tends to hold at the jaw and the pelvic floor too. |
| The drivers are ordinary, and they add up | The pelvic floor (2024), the tongue tie (lifelong, and my family has a history of them) and the asthma (childhood) all predate the injury | Supported. The injury amplified a pattern; it didn’t start one. |
| Hallinan and Mallon’s “right torsion” (my head turned right on C2; causes they list: the bite, a narrow palate, a tongue tie, vision, trauma) | A tongue tie documented by two speech-language pathologists. Bony growths taking up room in my palate. Jaw joints that slip easily. Trauma: a collision with a goalpost in 2015. Vision: XLRS. | Every cause they list is present. As My Health already says, that makes the story hard to rule out. The right-canine test is still the one that could prove it wrong. |
| Pain on the right when I swallow reclined with my neck extended | A speech-language pathologist found exactly the tissue that would hurt: a high voice box, a narrow gap between the hyoid and thyroid cartilage, stiffness around the voice box | The strongest new support. The swallow study can look at it directly. |
| Sidedness (left nasal valve, right-sided swallowing pain, neck turned left under my head) | An ENT disputes the left nasal valve collapse. The stiffness around my voice box is worse on the left. My jaw is tender left more than right. | Weaker than the page makes it sound. The pattern is mixed, not cleanly right-sided. |
| Nasal valve collapse on the left (from the CBCT practice’s markings) | The October ENT found my nasal valves “well supported”, with a small septal deviation that doesn’t block anything | Disputed. I’ll get this settled before paying for any valve treatment. |
| Sleep testing, and a CPAP I started in mid-October 2026 | Only home sleep tests so far, one mild, one moderate. An ENT doubts it’s purely apnea and mentioned possible limb movements in sleep. In January I had no sleep complaints; by October I was sleeping about four hours a night. | Sleep is the biggest open question. An overnight sleep study in a lab would settle it. |
| Right-sided nerve symptoms; a normal nerve test | An ENT recorded weakness, tingling and pain in both hands | The nerve test covered my right side only. I’ll ask whether my left hand should be tested. |
A question of my own: my jaw joints slip out of place easily, but my hips and shoulders barely rotate, about 5° of inward rotation at the hips and 5–10° at the shoulders. Is my jaw taking up motion the rest of me has lost? That’s my interpretation, and a question for a jaw specialist and my PT.
Mind
My anxiety follows the load
| When | Anxiety (GAD-7, 0–21) | Depression (PHQ-9, 0–27) | What was going on |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 2024 | 0 | — | Before the injury |
| December 2025 | 13 (moderate) | 5 | Eight months after the injury; my first semester of the PhD; jaw pain since October |
| February 2026 | 5, then 9 | 2, then 5 | Working with a speech-language pathologist, a night guard, breathing practice |
| March 2026 | 6 | — | |
| September 2026 | 15 (severe) | 9 | Fellowship decisions, my leave approaching, my heaviest work weeks, everything at once |
My anxiety rose after the injury and eased in early 2026, when I had a plan. It hit severe when work, school and life peaked together. That’s what you’d expect from someone overwhelmed by circumstances.
The question of hypomania, in context
- December 2025: a psychiatrist reviewing my chart found nothing suggesting mania.
- October 2026, one week:
- An ENT noted that my speech was pressured.
- The emergency department found no hypomania now or before, and my speech was normal in the interview.
- My therapist, two days later, saw pressured speech and a hypomanic mood.
Two of three clinicians that week noticed something. That’s a real signal, and I’m not dismissing it.
That same week I’d been sleeping about four hours a night for weeks, drinking three to four large coffees a day, taking hydroxyzine up to four times a day, and changing what I was taking, in the hardest stretch of my year. Any one of those can make speech fast, sleep broken and a person agitated. That’s exactly why psychiatry needs to separate how I was that week from how I am.
A test both readings can agree on: two or three weeks of real sleep, moderate caffeine and nothing else changing, with one line a night on mood, energy and sleep.
- If the speed and energy settle, that points to overload.
- If they don’t, that points to a mood pattern.
Either answer is useful. I’m bringing the log to psychiatry.
What 2026 asked of me
- My body: an injury still symptomatic 18 months later, about 20 lb lost, and sleep down to around four hours.
- School: qualifying exams in the spring, two fellowship decisions, and a leave of absence filed in September.
- Work: my heaviest weeks of the year, with nights working past 1 a.m., and an out-of-state work trip.
- Driving: between Lebanon, Worcester, Boston and Portland, with a back and neck that flare when I sit.
- Everything else: people I love going through their own hard times, and me trying to carry some of it.
The world, measured
- Jobs: the US added 29,000 jobs in September 2026, and unemployment rose to 4.2%, the highest since 2021 (CNBC, NPR).
- Prices and pay: inflation ran 3.7% over the year to September, and inflation-adjusted hourly earnings fell 0.5% that month (Spokesman-Review).
- Mood: the University of Michigan consumer sentiment index was 46.3 in October, near the record low set in May (US News/Reuters).
- Gas: the war with Iran pushed gas past $3.75 a gallon in March and to a national average of $4.56 by Memorial Day, and crude oil topped $103 a barrel in September (Yahoo Finance, Scripps).
- Fellowships: the National Science Foundation halved its graduate research fellowships in 2025, rebounded to about 2,500 in 2026, and plans about 1,500 for 2027. Second-year PhD students like me can no longer apply (AIP, Nature).
- Early-career engineering jobs: hiring of new graduates at large tech companies is reported at about 65% below 2019, and Stanford finds employment for 22-to-25-year-olds in AI-exposed jobs about 19% below trend (IEEE Spectrum).
- Mental health, broadly:
- 76% of American adults call the future of the nation a significant source of stress, and 63% of 18-to-34-year-olds have thought about moving abroad (APA Stress in America 2025, via Newsweek).
- 69% of college students reported a mental or behavioral health concern in the past year (UnitedHealth Group, April 2026).
- About 35% of graduate students have anxiety (meta-analysis, data through 2022).
None of this diagnoses anything. It does mean that “the world feels very difficult” is a measurable fact, not a distortion. It lands squarely on where I am: a narrowing fellowship path, a weak market for early-career engineers, and a lot of expensive driving.
What I take from all of it
This section is my reading.
- Body: I’m braced from my jaw to my pelvic floor, with the tongue tie, my airway and my one strong eye feeding in at the head end. The injury, and then 2026, pushed a held system past what it could absorb. The analysis in My Health stands, except that the sidedness is messier than it reads and the nasal valve is disputed.
- Why it’s felt like being dismissed: most of the clinics I’ve seen look for structural damage, and I don’t have structural damage. Each specialist has looked at one piece, nobody has owned the whole picture, and I’ve been the one carrying it between offices. What I need is people who assess function: speech-language pathologists, myofunctional therapy, PRI- and Hartman-style physical therapy, voice specialists. Structural specialists are there to rule things out.
- Mind: my anxiety tracks my load. The hypomania signals arrived in my worst week, with my sleep and everything else at their extremes. A few weeks of rest, written down, will answer it either way.
- The world: the pressure is real and measurable. Resting isn’t giving up; it’s how I get a clean reading.
What I’m asking for next
- Lumbar MRI: that whoever reads it knows about the 2024 pelvic floor test as well as my current bladder, genital and right-foot symptoms. The same low nerves serve all of them.
- Swallow study: that it include a swallow with my head tipped back or reclined, the position that brings on the pain, and that they see the January speech-language pathology findings.
- From my doctors:
- the pelvic floor test recommended in 2024;
- a nerve test on my left side;
- an overnight sleep study in a lab;
- a jaw specialist and a hearing test;
- a consultation about releasing the tongue tie;
- a replacement night guard.
- Psychiatry: a decision made with the anxiety scores above, the context of that week, and two or three weeks of rest logged in writing.