My stroke arm lifts itself into the air when I yawn. Every single time. New damage, or am I haunted?

#1davew1966(Joined Oct 2025 · 9 posts)April 26, 2026, 8:40 am

Eleven months post stroke. Right side. The arm is coming along, those who read my other thread know the sandwich story is pending.

New thing this last month or so. When I yawn, the right arm lifts. On its own. Rises about halfway, hangs there while the yawn finishes, drifts back down. Every yawn. My wife has started announcing "arm's up" like I might not have noticed my own arm saluting the television.

Also, and maybe related, the right hand balls itself into a fist when I walk anywhere fast, or when I carry the shopping with the GOOD hand. I'm not doing it. I unclench it, ten steps later it's back.

Physio is two weeks away. The internet at 2am offered me three options: spasticity getting worse, some kind of seizure, or new damage. Straight answers appreciated. I've been ambushed by enough things this year without my own arm joining in.

#2keithb57(Joined Oct 2024 · 51 posts)April 26, 2026, 12:55 pm

davew1966 said:

New damage, or am I haunted?

Neither. You've got what my house called the salute. Mine did it for the best part of a year, every yawn, arm up like I was asking permission to leave the room.

When I finally confessed it to my physio, expecting a scan, she was completely unbothered. Her explanation, roughly: big efforts and big reflexes leak into the weak arm because the brain's filter for keeping movements separate is still being rebuilt. Then she did something better than reassure me, she USED it. The fist thing especially. Fist creeping shut meant the task was too hard or I was too tired, full stop. It became the fuel gauge on the dashboard. When my hand got better, the salute faded out. Couldn't tell you when it stopped, I just noticed one day it hadn't happened in months.

#3Geoffswife(Joined Jan 2025 · 38 posts)April 27, 2026, 9:20 am

Watching from the carer's chair: Geoff's fist clenches on uneven ground and on stairs, and for the best part of a year I read it as him being tense or cross, and kept telling him to RELAX, which I can report helped neither of us.

Then his therapist explained it travels with effort, it isn't mood, and taught us to treat it as information instead of a fault. These days if his hand is fisting on the flat, that's the day's budget spent and we go home, and our outings have gone better ever since. I wish someone had told us in month two instead of month ten.

#4mattw_tbi(Joined Jun 2025 · 17 posts)April 28, 2026, 7:33 pm

TBI flavour of the same thing: my left leg goes rigid when I do hard THINKING. Tax return, leg like a plank. Effort is effort apparently, the brain doesn't much care whether it's stairs or spreadsheets. Nobody warned me either, and I also went through the 2am seizure-googling phase, so you're in good company.

#5Dr Paul HutchinsClinical moderator(Joined Nov 2024 · 64 posts)April 29, 2026, 8:50 am

Dave, what you have described is called an associated reaction, and it is one of the most common and least explained things in stroke recovery, so let me take your three 2am options apart properly.

The mechanism first. The stroke damaged the fast, selective pathway that lets the brain talk to one muscle at a time. Recovering movement borrows older, broader routes that don't isolate muscles well, so any big surge, physical effort, fatigue, anxiety, a sneeze, a cough, a yawn, spills over into the affected side as a stereotyped posture, most often the arm flexing up and the hand fisting, exactly your pattern. The yawn version is so well recognised it has its own improbable medical name, parakinesia brachialis oscitans, and it is reported almost exclusively in people recovering from stroke. You are a textbook, not a mystery. Against your list: it is not new damage, it is old damage being worked around. It is not the spasticity itself worsening, spasticity is the resistance someone feels when your limb is moved and this is a movement your limb produces, though the two travel together and the distinction is laid out in the site's guide to spasticity and botulinum toxin. And it is not a seizure: seizures are not reliably triggered by a yawn, don't produce the same tidy movement each time, and often involve spread or altered awareness, none of which you describe. Honest numbers are scarce because studies define these reactions differently, but in practice most people with meaningful arm weakness will notice some version, and almost nobody is warned.

What to do with it is what Keith's physio did: use it. Associated reactions are an effort meter you cannot fool, so let the fist set the level, keep tasks just under the threshold where it closes, and expect the reactions to shrink as selective control returns, which is the story told in arm and hand recovery after stroke. Do still raise it at your appointment in two weeks so it goes on the record and into the plan, and keep the usual boundary in view: this is a stereotyped movement with an obvious trigger. Anything genuinely new and unprovoked, weakness that wasn't there yesterday, a change in face or speech, is emergency territory, not a forum question, and not this.

#6davew1966(Joined Oct 2025 · 9 posts)May 20, 2026, 5:45 pm

Update from the appointment. Physio watched me yawn on demand (harder than it sounds), said "associated reaction" before the arm was even back down, and wrote it in the folder. She laughed at "haunted", kindly, and confirmed the rule: fist means stop.

New household system: wife still says "arm's up", but now it means put the kettle on, we're done for the day. Also tested Matt's theory on the VAT return. Leg fine. Arm up. Case closed.