The first post in a series on focal dystonia about how it all started

How it all began

It was September 2016, and a new school year was beginning for me as a classical guitar teacher. I was getting to know my new students. One of the older students told me he wanted to apply to a conservatory and asked whether I could prepare him for the entrance examinations. Of course I agreed. I also saw it as a major challenge, because no one had ever asked me to do this before.

I drew up a plan covering not only guitar playing, but also music theory, aural training and music history. Among other things, I started practising the guitar a great deal again so that I could set a proper example for my student. I had graduated from the conservatory only a year earlier, in 2015, and had spent that year mostly resting, with practice taking a back seat. This new challenge brought me back to practising and to working on things I had previously neglected. I took the old skeletons out of the cupboard and, in a sense, became a guitar student again. I practised as intensively as I had before my final examinations, often for six hours a day or more. I revived my old repertoire and began learning new pieces. A year after leaving the conservatory, I once again felt the urge to practise, perform and compose. I also worked hard on my tremolo, which still had room for improvement, pushing it to speeds I had never reached before: 600 notes per minute and more, or semiquavers at a crotchet tempo of 150 bpm.

In early December 2016, I arrived for a lesson, listened to my student playing and then picked up the guitar to demonstrate how I imagined a passage should sound. To my surprise, I couldn't find the strings with my right hand. Whenever I tried to play anything, I felt enormous tension in my right forearm. After a few seconds I did manage to play the passage, but a disturbing thought stayed with me: something was happening.

After teaching, I went straight to the practice room and began practising. My hands felt strangely stiff, and I found it difficult to increase the tempo at all. After a while things improved, and I went home feeling fairly reassured. Yet the thought that something wasn't quite right stayed with me...