… At a family gathering, a small, familiar panic: my nose is running, and I can’t find my handkerchief.

Tru here. This entry is by Truthful Loving Kindness (my full legal name) for https://truthfulkindness.com/. For comments or questions, please use that website. More admin information is at the bottom of this entry. My most recent painting is “Hanky2026 — Carried not out of habit, but as a quiet act of adaptation.”

There are symptoms that arrive with a name, a paragraph, a checklist.

And then there are the others.

The ones you learn by living them.

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For me, one of those has been a runny nose.

Not seasonal. Not allergic so no sneezing, etc. Not something that comes and goes with a cold. It has been present for about fifteen years now—steady, watery, and entirely uninterested in explanation. I do not buy clothes without a pocket for handkerchief. I do not sit down without knowing where my handkerchief is. This is not preference; it is architecture.

And yet, if you look for it in descriptions of Lewy body dementia, you will not easily find it.

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There is, however, a clue.

Lewy body dementia affects the autonomic nervous system—the part of the body that runs quietly in the background, managing what we do not consciously direct: blood pressure, digestion, sweating, salivation. The invisible systems. The ones that do not ask permission.

When that system becomes dysregulated, it does not fail cleanly. It shifts. It overdoes. It underdoes. It forgets its own calibration.

In Parkinson’s disease—a close biological relative to Lewy Body—researchers have documented something called rhinorrhea: a persistent, watery runny nose that is not caused by allergies or infection. In one study, “rhinorrhea was reported more frequently in patients with Parkinson disease than in controls,” and was “typically watery and not associated with allergic symptoms.” They point instead to autonomic dysfunction. The body’s internal “faucet” is simply set too high.

That framing matters.

Because once you see it that way, the symptom is no longer random.

It belongs.

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At night, I also experience episodes of sudden, unpredictable sweating. They feel almost identical to menopause—except menopause ended more than twenty-five years ago. These are not hormonal tides. They are something else.

Again, the autonomic system.

Again, regulation without stability.

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What is striking is not just the symptoms themselves, but their status.

Unlisted. Under-discussed. Easy to dismiss.

A runny nose sounds trivial—until you are the one designing your entire day around access to cloth and discretion. Until you are calculating social spaces, fabrics, proximity. Until you realize that what appears small can, over time, become structural.

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There is a particular kind of invisibility here.

If a symptom is not widely named, it is often quietly reassigned—to aging, to coincidence, to “just one of those things.” And yet, lived experience suggests otherwise. Patterns emerge. Parallels appear across related conditions. The body tells a consistent story, even if the literature has not fully caught up in naming each sentence.

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I am increasingly aware that living with Lewy body dementia symptoms is not only about managing what is known.

It is also about recognizing what is coherent but unnamed.

About trusting that if a symptom fits the system, it may belong to the system—even if no one has yet given it a line item.

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So I carry a handkerchief.

Not as a minor convenience, but as part of a larger design—an adaptation to a nervous system that no longer regulates quietly in the background.

And perhaps, over time, these quieter symptoms will become more visible. Not because they have changed, but because we have learned how to see them.

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Sometimes the body is speaking clearly.

It is the categories that are still catching up..

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Attached Picture:

Yes; the cover photo is a digital painting of mine. “Hanky2026 — Carried not out of habit, but as a quiet act of adaptation.” Again, I mostly used AlainaJensen brush sets; this time especially the Felting brushes, with Procreate tools on iPad that compensate for my tremors. The higher resolution picture shown below is available for free download from my Flickr acct at >> https://www.flickr.com/photos/194191353@N04/. Ai description of digital painting: A stylized illustration of a triangular handkerchief featuring floral motifs, decorative stitching, and soft pastel colors, surrounded by whimsical botanical elements.

Links to SOURCES used in this entry:

Rhinorrhea in Parkinson Disease (Neurology journal). A clinical study documenting persistent, non-allergic runny nose as a feature of Parkinson’s, linked to autonomic dysfunction.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20350983/ ;

Lewy Body Dementia Association — Educational materials on Lewy body dementia, including autonomic symptoms and how the condition affects the body’s regulatory systems. at >> https://www.lbda.org/ .

Contact Options:

Other contact options are FaceBook and “X” (aka Twitter), both under “Truthful Kindness”. On Reddit, i am at “TruthfulKindness” in groups “r/dementia”, “r/lewybodydementia”, and “r/alzheimers”. i dropped my LinkedIn membership quite a few years ago. If requesting “friend” status for any form of Social media, please send a private message explaining that you are a reader of my blog. …

* Admin issues:

Invested 3 days on text and art for this entry. ******* SUBSCRIPTION box is now at the bottom of each blog entry. … My own full legal name is Truthful Loving Kindness. My current formal diagnosis is still clinically at stage of “Mild Cognitive Impairment”, altho my Primary Care Physician and several other medical personnel disagree and consider it some form of dementia. My PCP files still say “Dementia without behavioral disturbance, unspecified dementia type”. In the past several years, my Primary Care Physician, Husband/Care-Partner, and Myself have agreed to quit seeing specialists for further clinical clarification of diagnosis and stage. Specialists are too far away, and the emotional roller-coaster causing stress is not worth it to me. My dementia symptoms are mostly Lewy Body and Vascular types of dementia symptoms, but SPECT and PET scans show my brain damage is currently most serious in the temporal lobes, which creates a lot of similarities with the Logopenic variant of PPA (a subtype of Fronto-Temporal type of dementia). ******* …   Text Copyright © Truthful L. Kindness on 2026Apr05 at 9pm.   … You can find more about me in this blog under the “About Me” tab (although that page was posted long ago and also needs an update). Feel free to leave your thoughts here in the form of comments, but please filter your comments with truthful loving kindness to all concerned. … *** 2026 i have begun to use “ChatGPT” editor; This improves readability and reduces the time I spend in the writing process, but retains my writing style. I am still on the “free” version of the blog (except for the domain name TruthfulKindness), so I notice there are now quite a few more advertisements on the page. Sorry. Currently in negotiations to transfer to the paid version of the blog to avoid advertisements. I have no control over which advertisements are shown. … ******* …  I don’t mind re-posting of things I write, but if you re-post, then I expect you to make it clear this is NOT written by you. My authorship as Truthful Kindness (my legal name) must be clearly identified, and you must provide a very prominent Link to my website so that questions and comments can be addressed to ME personally at http://www.truthfulkindness.com.

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categ: travel, jrny, relat, Sx. <10 tags: autonomic dysfunction, dementia, invisible symptoms, lewy body, nervous syswtem dysregulation, night sweats, non-motor symptoms, Parkinson’s, Persons Living with Dementia, PLwD, rhinorrhea, runny nose, unexplained symptoms. Add to Pgs/S&S Categ: Clothing, Hygiene, Invisible,