One Week and Counting
One week from now I will be having surgery to implant wires in my brain to help slow the progression of my Parkinson’s. Specifically tremors, slowness of movement and muscle rigidity are targeted. It is not a particularly invasive procedure, except the part about sticking a wire into my brain. Though there are a risks, the surgery has a high success rate at improving the quality of life for people living with Parkinson’s.
With all the good things that can result from this procedure, I seem to be focussed on the worst possible outcomes. In recent months I met with an attorney to get various powers of attorneys set, ensured my finances are in order and filled my car up with gas. As the surgery gets closer, I have started to clean, organize and rearrange my room. My logic is that nobody wants to have to deal with my piles of papers, a messy closet, or dead bugs on the windowsill if something goes wrong in the hospital. Some things I did:
Got rid of my desk so there’s no place to pile papers
Put the pile of papers in a box in the garage in case there was something important in there
Recycled an inoperable laptop, a broken printer and four old iPhones – why did I keep these things?
Removed the dust from my bookshelf
Put the dust on my TV so it would look like I read books rather than watch TV
I know I am doing all these things out of nervousness and anxiety. If something bad should result from the surgery I will wish that I did more, saw more and lived more. I have things I would like to do. Everyone has running with the bulls in Pamplona and parachuting on their bucket lists, but mine is more pedestrian:
Read Les Miserables (1400 pages in English, or 39 hours of reading)
Watch every episode of The Simpsons (743 episodes, 13 days of continuous viewing)
Ride the tea cups of Disneyland again
Use a slip and slide just one more time (that’s a summertime thing)
These may not seem to be dangerous on the surface. Only reading Les Miserables will not risk my health safety or sanity like the others.
With only seven days left there’s probably nothing I can do to ride the tea cups. Have you seen the wait list and price to get into Disneyland these days? Instead, I will look forward to a week of cleaning, organizing, and rearranging the house. After I recover, I will buy a slip and slide.
Read more about Deep Brain Stimulation at DBS Michael J Fox Foundation
