PBA is Pseudo Bulbar Affect. I first heard about this when I saw this commercial. Now, this was not to mean that I hadn’t experienced the uncontrolled laughing or crying but I finally had a name and reason for doing this. Looking back and thinking about it, when telling funny stories to my family, I can’t catch my breath to tell the whole story because I’m laughing too much. My family laughs and says it’s “just something that Jenny does.” I remember correcting Sean when he was younger and I started laughing. He gave me a puzzled look and asked why I was laughing and I old him that I didn’t know. I did it again when I was upset about something he did and I started laughing so Sean did too. I told him that, “I may be laughing, but you’re still in trouble!”
It’s become the norm that I cry watching A Football Life stories pretty regularly, stories about players in the NFL draft, and random commercials. Songs make me cry pretty often. The more I thought about it, I guess I kind of did this a lot. This fact really hasn’t been a problem for me except for the time I started laughing uncontrollably during a weekday morning mass. It was summertime and 8 o’clock mass so there weren’t a lot of people there; it was a part of mass when it was silent. I tried covering it up by coughing but Sean told me that it wasn’t convincing.
This morning, it happened again. My mom was over and it REALLY bothered her. It was a tense moment between us and I hit my knee. It really hurt so my eyes welled up. But then I started laughing. So here I was with tears streaming down my checks and I’m laughing uncontrollably. My Mom wasn’t happy with my laughter (tense moment, remember?) She walked away and said, “You, just laugh” (or something like that) kind of angrily. I called after her and said, “I can’t control it…”
I started looking for that PBA commercial online. I saw this aYouTube video and appreciated how it was explained even though I haven’t had a stroke. I searched further and I saw this YouTube video that fits with MS. I am by no means promoting drugs of any kind (If you’ve read different parts of my blog, you’d know that’s not my bag) but I’m left-handed and that’s 10% of the population so I figured that the video was meant to be shared by me and it’s pretty informative and proves that I REALLY CAN’T control it!