Dusty Wentworth

One of the hardest parts of my recovery has not been PTSD, fibromyalgia, Functional Neurological Disorder, or even surviving a ruptured brain aneurysm. Those things are visible enough. They can be named, diagnosed, measured, medicated, explained. The real fight has been with masculinity. Not in the abstract, but in my own life, my own body, and my own sense of self. That fight came in two parts. Waking Up in the Future After my aneurysm rupture, I regained consciousness with significant memory loss. Doctors, nurses, and family kept telling me I was fifty years old. In my head, I was still in my mid thirties. I had not aged into this stage of life. I had arrived in it without warning or preparation. It felt less like recovery and more like waking up in the future. If someone had asked me in my thirties whether I would like to time travel fifteen years forward, I would probably have said yes. You expect things to improve. You assume progress. Instead, I woke into a reality th...

There are moments in life that do not announce themselves as turning points until long after they have passed. Others arrive with brutal clarity, altering the landscape of what lies ahead in the space of a single sentence.  Tuesday 13 January 2026 was one of those moments. It was my first medical appointment of the new year, and by the time I left the consulting room, I knew that a door I had been moving towards for the last two years had quietly, decisively closed. The appointment was with my neurologist and focused on my Functional Neurological Disorder (FND). FND remains the most debilitating of my diagnoses, not only because of the severity of its physical symptoms, but because of the uncertainty that continues to surround it. Each consultation carries the same fragile expectation: that a new approach might emerge, a different perspective, or a previously unexplored intervention that could offer some relief. On this occasion, that expectation lasted only minutes. Th...