release 3.0

With this post, Omnem gets reborn again. It started as a more or less political blog in 07, went dormant for a while, came back as a yoga journal, was reconstituted as a hushed library of tarot card readings and lore, went to sleep again briefly, and now returns as a daily report on "the condition."

I just dropped by to see what condition my condition is in.

I first started showing symptoms of Parkinson´s Disease in 2007, about the time I got divorced, quit smoking, and got a new diet. I  didn´t plan on doing all those things at once -- had never planned to do any of them, really  --  but that´s how it went.

In the spring of that year I noticed my right hand would shake uncontrollably whenever I drove, only stopping when I took my right hand off the wheel. I quickly learned to drive left-handed. About that same time, I was struggling to keep a handwritten journal, but the handwriting kept going farther and farther south, no matter how hard I tried to make it pretty and neat and uniform, which had been so easy and a source of pride when I was younger.

The next year the right-hand tremor grew worse, and I told my daughter about it. She kind of panicked right away, and convinced herself I was suffering from essential tremor,  She seemed to know what she was talking about, and had me convinced too.

Therefore, I was surprised when, the month after my mother died, in January of 09, I went to her doctor, Marie Matty at the Doctors´Clinic in Poulsbo, who gave me a tentative diagnosis of Parkinson's. The tremor, as she pointed out, was all on one side, and the onset of the condition came late in life (past 60).

Still, the only thing I was taking for it then was marijuana (smoking joints). In December of that year I moved to Seatttle from the Olympic Peninsula, and before the month was out was living in a world  of hurt, as the shaking suddenly got a lot worse, and I began to think of ending myself, since I knew I couldn´t live that way.

A visit to a Seattle GP, Marcy Hamrick, who practiced at the Seattle Institute of Oriental Medicine where I´d been taking acupuncture for PD with no effect, confirmed Matty´s diagnosis and gave me  my first prescription for Sinemet, the little yellow pill without which life would be impossible. I was plunged into a world of competing approaches to the disease, but determined to try anything, and take the best of both.

So after obtaining a state marijuana card for Washington, and availing myself of the medicines at the Seattle Medical Marijuana Association, I found myself able to function once more, with three Sinemet a day, and having switched to edible marijuana by that time, a slice of banana bread with each of the three doses, to head off the nausea that almost always accompanies artificial dopamine, which is what Sinemet mostly is.

Now I'm at the next phase, you could say. Without any meds, I'm a shuffling, palsied, mumblin, stumblin, fumblin, drooling fool.  When I'm fully medicated, most of the people I meet would never guess I'm sick.

Tomorrow: doc @ the radar station.