“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”—Sharon Begley.

Then another weird (it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?) symptom appeared in early August 2011. As I was sitting back in a couch relaxing, I felt this odd sensation in my upper back as if I couldn’t completely relax it, like I couldn’t get it to touch the back of the couch even though I was sitting as far back I could.

Some days later, I was again sitting in a chair with my back pressed into the back of the chair, and again it felt like my back couldn’t touch it. It soon became apparent that all the muscles of my upper back, shoulders and upper arms were vibrating very hard but extremely fast and very minutely.

This led me to explore tremors, but I couldn’t find any type of tremor that was like what I was experiencing. Indeed, they are not tremors, but vibrations. The closest thing I found were peripheral nerve hyperexcitability syndromes, which I was tested for (to the degree that we could test for them back in 2011). However, this weird symptom only lasted for several months and mostly disappeared on its own. So it appears that once again, I had something new to medical science, and therefore a symptom without a name. For this one, I came up with the moniker, the zizzies.

Here are the features: they occur bilaterally; they can affect all the muscles of the upper back: trapezius, infraspinatus, supraspinatus, rhombus major and minor, teres major and minor, deltoids, triceps. Everything contracts at the same fixed rate, which might even be something like 10 Hertz. The amplitude is extremely tiny, probably about one mm, so they are not visible to the naked eye. The contractions are very strong. I can feel them with my hand if I touch an affected muscle, and it feels like I am touching an electric razor. If you want to know what if feels like, get a hold of a tuning fork, bang it and then feel that. It’s quite similar. Or just hold an electric razor.

I started getting them when going to bed, and it was uncomfortable because I was lying down and felt like I couldn’t completely relax into the bed.

On occasion, I would feel them in the legs, but I don’t think they are related in any way to restless leg syndrome. I had no desire to move any affected part. Indeed, I wanted to do the opposite: relax them.