Childhood Trauma Caused a 'Software Glitch' in my Brain | Functional Neurological Disorder
Sickboy
CBC
4.8 • 524 Ratings
🗓️ 19 November 2025
⏱️ 59 minutes
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Summary
Imagine your brain’s hardware is perfect, but the software is glitching so badly your body stops working.
We sit down with Erum, a biochemist who navigates the world with a rare and often misunderstood condition: Functional Neurological Disorder (FND). We Raw Dog into the fascinating science behind the diagnosis. Basically her brain has a "software glitch" but the hardware is pristine. So how, and why is it causing the left side of her body to physically fail during flare-ups? Erum shares her harrowing and resilient story, from a terrifying ER visit where doctors suspected a brain tumor or MS, to the "magic trick" test that finally led to her FND diagnosis. We discuss the profound connection between her condition and a history of severe childhood trauma, including growing up as a child of deaf adults (CODA) and surviving abuse. Plus, we talk about the healing power of boxing and how FND finally forced her to stop people-pleasing.
You can watch this entire episode over on YouTube!
Transcript
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| 0:35.9 | The reason why you're dealing with this is because of a history of just like incredibly horrific |
| 0:42.8 | trauma from your childhood. Is that correct? Yeah, because even in that same appointment, |
| 0:48.4 | when he kind of, you know, smiled at the fact that like a relief of like, okay, he figured out it was |
| 0:52.7 | F&D, the next question he asked me was |
| 0:55.0 | have you been through a lot of trauma do you have depression do you have anxiety and I was like |
| 0:59.4 | where how does this even connect? |
| 1:05.2 | Yeah yeah fuck I'm just going to start using that |
| 1:11.5 | super out of context. |
| 1:12.4 | Yeah, |
| 1:26.3 | use it like where it makes no sense at all. Totally. I'm going to start only using it with like, I'm going to go to bed at 930. I'm going to go to bed 930. I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? What are you talking about? Hey, have you fed the girls yet? No. Okay, I'll raw dog it. |
| 1:27.7 | I'm like, what the fuck? |
| 1:31.2 | Um, okay, let's it. I'm like, what the fuck. |
| 1:30.2 | Um, |
| 1:30.2 | okay, |
... |
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