24 Hours

I’ve been without my tremor for 24 hours now. What a difference! Now my arms swings when I walk, I can eat without throwing my food across the room, and I can get the toothpaste on my toothbrush. I should be over the moon with excitement, but instead, I am sad my tremor has gone away. I am not surprised that the DBS works. I am surprised at how much I miss my tremor.

I have only myself to blame. I lived with my tremor so long I had made friends with it. My tremor first came to me when gripping the steering wheel of my car and my arm would rhythmically shake. I called it my driving buddy. My tremor and I would sing along with the radio and drum together on the dashboard.Tremor was lousy at keeping the beat for slow songs, but punk rock…look out!

I enjoyed the company of my driving buddy when I commuted to work alone. Besides singing and drumming, I liked to have tremor there to validate my yelling at other drivers I perceived as unsafe or just plain dumb. My tremor always agreed with me. Even after it was identified as Parkinson’s, tremor and I remained friends, though more distant. It is hard to be friends with some thing I take medication‘s to eliminate. It is even harder to remain close when tremor is attacking more and more of my body.

So, now with DBS, I have mostly eliminated my buddy from my life but for some reason I miss it. I guess it is time to get more new friends hopefully my next friend will be human, a good singer, and a competent drummer.

Note: I wrote the above on April 14, 2023, 24 hours after my DBS unit was turned on. Shortly thereafter, I started to experience unwanted effects (AKA side effects) which made it difficult to read my own writing or type on a keyboard. This is not great for someone who spends most of his time writing!  In fact, there is a whole other paragraph written for the above post that I wrote but cannot read! It is now almost 2 weeks later and I have had a second programming visit. I can read my writing (sometimes), my arms still swing when I walk (always), and I still miss my tremor (but only a little bit).