Ben Giesbrecht is just another young man. He's 20 years old, he's thinking about his future, what he wants to study at school, and that's how he likes it.
The easy-going Grizzlys goalie has strolled in after the team played in Drayton Valley the night before, the bus returning home at 2 a.m.
He's here to talk about having Tourette Syndrome (TS). To Giesbrecht, TS is just a part of everyday life, one he's never allowed to define him.
Giesbrecht grew up in Aldergrove, B.C. and started experiencing symptoms – little shoulder movements -- when he was 12.
"It wasn't too severe. There's definitely a lot of worse cases. I think the doctor told me mine's pretty mild, to be honest," he says.
Those movements were tics, defined by the charity Tourette Canada as sudden, repetitive, involuntary movements or sounds that serve no purpose. In Giesbrecht's case, they were motions, known as motor tics.
Tics are further classified as simple (involving one muscle group) or complex (involving many). That's the difference between simple shoulder shrugging and jumping around. Or the difference between throat clearing, and uttering words and phrases (we'll get to the swearing later).
In Giesbrecht's case, he twitches a little, but infrequently. It's not noticeable.
TS is a neurological condition that causes these tics but there is no lab test for it. Among the diagnostic criteria, one must experience tics for more than a year. Therefore, it took several doctor's visits before Giesbrecht was diagnosed.
For him, growing up with TS was fairly easy. When questions arose, a quick explanation was all teachers needed.
"No one ever really gave me a hard time, never had people bullying me," he says. "There were maybe two incidents in my whole life that I can think of but I can't really tell the events of it. Yeah, I was pretty fortunate."
Neither have tics affected him as an athlete.
"When I'm super focused, I don't really do it. I'm just thinking about the game and it kind of just goes away," he says. "And if I do it in a game, I don't notice it. And it never happens when the play is in my end."
Just because one has TS, that doesn't mean he or she couldn't excel at athletics. Giesbrecht names Tim Howard, a Major League Soccer goalkeeper as a professional athlete with the condition.
Deborah Thomson, executive director for Tourette Canada, says TS is still misunderstood and stigmatized. The biggest misconception, is that TS is the "swearing disease," she says.
Tourette Canada states about one per cent of the population has TS and only 10 per cent of those people experience coprolalia, the involuntary utterances of obscenities.
"Normally, when we would swear, we would use the swear word as a descriptor. Whereas with Tourette, it comes out in different ways, in non-logical places," Thomson says.
She says tics can be misunderstood for bad behaviour, which is why education is important to inform people why a child might be acting a certain way. Also, TS does not affect intelligence.
While there is no cure for TS, Thomson names a few treatments: cognitive behavioural intervention which teaches people to deflect or control their tics, medication, and in extreme cases, brain surgery.
Each case is unique. Thomson says exercise can be therapeutic by calming anxiety-induced tics. Others might prefer to be quiet and still.
"One of the things that has been known to set tics off is good and bad stress. The more the person or the individual is stressed, the more they may be inclined to tic. If they're in a very excited, anxious environment, even if it's good, they may be prone to tic. It might depend on the individual," she says.
Giesbrecht says he manages his tics by sticking to a good diet and a strict sleep schedule. Again, it's nothing out of the ordinary and he compares his condition to something everybody can relate to.
"When you have the hiccups, it's the exact same thing. It's not tiring at all or anything like that. It just happens."
For more information on Tourette Syndrome, visit www.tourette.ca
"When I'm super focused, I don't really do it. I'm just thinking about the game and it kind of just goes away." BEN GIESBRECHT, Grizzlys goalie
