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Wednesday 29 July 2015

Fear of dementia can be a butterfly kiss

One lady on a PD forum announced that she had just been diagnosed with Dementia with lewy bodies. I decided to read up on it. Whoa! Scary! I hope it goes well with her but her future does not look bright.

Having scared the ________________(fill in the blanks)out of me, I researched types of dementia. You know. Just for fun. Seems there nine different types of dementia and some have subsets with similar, but different symptoms. Here are the top six.

  1. Alzheimers
  2. Vascular dementia
  3. Dementia with Lewy bodies
  4. Parkinson's dementia
  5. Frontal-temporal dementia
  6. Creutzfeldt-Jakob (you have to be really unlucky to get this 1 in a million)

Have you wet your pants yet?

Fear of the unknown is man's greatest fear. One American president (FDR?) said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. I'm not sure what he meant because when you boil it down, it isn't possible to fear fear. How can you fear the same emotion?

But I digress. I reluctantly confess to a little trepidation of dementia, of one kind or another, occupying my future. I admit it is a distant fear but it is there nonetheless. However, fellow parkies, take heed of the words of the 3 little pigs, "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?" Enjoy the time you are dementialess. Live life as if you were going to go crazy tomorrow. Love, laugh and be happy. You live in a straw house already. You may never get dementia but, unfortunately, the big bad wolf will eventually eat you, morcel by morcel, over time.

Unless someone kills it first.

Saturday 18 July 2015

Fortunately, there were no winged monkeys in sight!

We went up to the cottage and for the first time in awhile, I slept soundly, vivid dream free. Woke up to a beautiful sunny morning and went for a 3 mile walk, incident free. The lake was calm, without a ripple and it was too early for anyone to interrupt the stillness of the day. But the weather changed a couple of hours later. Thunder, lightning, rain. I was going to go back to the city to watch a football game and began to get ready to go when my daughter said we should all go home. Being stuck in a cottage with one 4 year old precocious child and a one year old baby was not inviting, given the weather. So it was that we came upon one of nature's little goodies. On the drive home we watched the tornado pictured below fall from a cloud just 10 or so minutes into our drive. It was very eerie watching it as it descended. Some brave (or foolish) folks stopped their cars to take pictures. We did not. I suffered a feeling right out of one of my nightmares. I just wanted to get home. Exciting? Not really. But a touch scary. We made it home, undamaged. Nothing happened to us, but this thing touched down just south of our cottage. JUST SOUTH OF OUR COTTAGE!!!. Strange that we decided to leave when we did. This is the first and, I hope, the last tornado I will ever witness. The whole thing played out with the words of Daryl Van Horne (The Witches of Eastwick) in the back of my mind.

"... What's the matter? You don't think God makes mistakes? Of course He does. We all make mistakes! Of course, when we make mistakes, they call it evil! When God makes mistakes, they call it nature!"

Who said Manitoba is boring!!

Thursday 16 July 2015

Go hang your dreams on the hanging tree

What is it now? Three? Four nights in a row? My dreams are becoming a nuisance. Last night my wife awoke me by gently rubbing my shoulder and back. Apparently, I had yelled out loud "DON'T PUT YOUR FEET ON THE STREET". In my dream I was shouting "Don't put your feet on the substitute's face!". You figure it out. It makes no sense to me.

Shakespeare said "We are such stuff as dreams are made on...." Oh, oh. That doesn't sound good. Then there is Walt Disney who claimed "Dreams are a wish your heart makes". Sounds better. God forbid I should make a wish concerning a substitute teacher with a face full of feet. But, these dreams are so vivid, so real, that they feel like reality itself.It is difficult to decide who was right, William or Walt.

Old Sigmund opined that dreams were manifestations of inner turmoil, desires or anxieties (if I remember correctly) and he probably blamed it on mothers and repressed childhoods.

I have no inner turmoil and my childhood was A-plus, so I don't reckon Freud was correct for me. The dreams don't scare me and I don't try to interpret them in connection with my own life but I do wonder "What do I care if someone puts his foot in the face of a substitute teacher?". The fact is I don't ergo, my dream was a manifestation of nothing. It was just another little gift from the PD Gods- an invitation from Morpheus (or Hypnos) "Here chap, this will make your decline more interesting. Dream a little dream with me."

If I had the ability to do so, I might decline his offer but I might worry I was missing out on something. Fortunately, I am stuck with them, so my wife and I will just have to suffer a little sleep deprivation. Or, I could stay awake all night! One thing good about dreams is that they make you wonder. Thinking is a form of dream reinvention. It keeps you on your toes and brings out the scientist or dramatist in you. If you have never had a dream, you must be a boring person. I just wish they wouldn't be so excruciatingly vivid that I waken my wife. I will get it together and continue dreaming but I will also try to adjust the content away from feet to coincide with my desires and interests. Dreaming is a necessity for me, even PD dreams.

Let's just say, "I dream; therefor, I am."

Tuesday 14 July 2015

Edvard Munch pictured us perfectly

"New research by a team from the University of Toronto has just confirmed a link between Parkinson’s disease and a tendency to act out vivid dreams — a condition known as REM sleep behaviour disorder (RBD)." (see website "Health Unlocked").

Apparently, in a healthy brain the nerve to muscle path is cut off during REM sleep(rapid eye movement) when dreams occur and as a result, AYPWH (all you people with a healthy brain) are in effect paralyzed. For people with REM sleep disorder this paralysis does not occur leading to people shouting, kicking, sitting up and punching as they experience violent dreams. The researchers in Toronto estimate that 75% of people with RBD will eventually develop brain disorders such as Parkinson's.

I don't remember having violent dreams before I was diagnosed and I haven't read the Toronto study, but something tells me they have jumped to a conclusion that is not particularly supportable. Having said that, they may be right for certainly those of us with PD experience violent dreams and we have a tendency to act them out. For example, the night before last, or was it last night, I sat right up in bed and started making shooting noises. My wife woke me, again with the same question, (Are you OK?) to which I responded all was copacetic, I was just dreaming about shooting at Buddy Holly's (or was it Glen Campbell's) backup singer, trying to kill her before she killed me.

Now I don't know if either Buddy or Glen have a female backup or why I would want to kill her, or her me, but the dream was my reality for the few seconds it took to sit up and shoot. Luckily we don't keep guns in our house.

Before she went back to sleep, my wife, half jokingly said she might have to sleep in another room with the door locked for her own saftey.

Sleep is such an odd thing and dreaming even odder.


Sunday 12 July 2015

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Friday 10 July 2015

Daemons are imaginary; not scary, at least that's what I used to think.

“Nightmares are seldom a foreshadowing of real events, but always a showing of real fears.”
― Criss Jami

Are nightmares just releases of repressed aggression, fear, anger, etc? If true, I am really screwed up because I had a doozy last night. A psychiatrist could have a field day with this one. It started up innocently enough with me going to the bathroom. Not so bad except I knew I was going there because it was my safe room - ie - the only room in the house with a lock, feeble as it was. I thought I heard something. I opened the door, just a crack, and there was a man taking off his overcoat and hanging it up. Something told me to beware, exercise caution. He was no man! He was a daemon! A daemon on the hunt. He sniffed the air and he knew where I was hidden. I was going have to fight or run. But I couldn't outrun or outfight a daemon! I was scared, trying to summon up a dash of courage. Awareness flooded my body. I began to feel strange. Somehow stronger. Adrenalin, probably . No, it was more than that.

I began to change.

It happened in seconds. In the blink of an eye, I became........well, I am not sure, but wasn't pretty. You know,4-legged, claws, tail, drool....the whole nine yards. I started to hiss. Past tense became present tense. Looking up I see that a hole has appeared in the roof. Funny, that wasn't there before. Peering over the edge is the daemon.... waiting for me. I begin to hiss loudly, building courage and feeling the energy gathering in my limbs. I leap through the hole to tackle the daemon. We begin a dance of death. Hissing and drooling, we approach each other with bared fangs, claws at the ready. I charge...... only to be awakened by my wife pressing her hand against my shoulder.

"Are you all right Doug."

"Huh?"

"You were making a strange noise."

"I'm OK. It was just one of those parkie dreams. You know, the virtual reality kind"

"What was it about?"

"Nothing much. I was fighting a daemon.. In fact, I had just turned into one when you woke me."

"That was the noise you were making?"

"Yes. Sorry."

Scary stuff! For me and my wife. I await the next one with anticipation. When you're older, you understand the existence of the boundary between imagination and reality. Dreams are just dreams, but in dreams we get what we long for, a return to our youth where fantasy kept you out of the basement because that "thing" in your dreams might be down there. Lack of fear is a function of age.

Reality is a drag.

Wednesday 1 July 2015

WOW!!

As you may have read, I had a bad time with falls a week ago. My face was shredded in a couple of places and cut in a couple of more. To put it simply, I was a mess and the next day, even worse, with swelling over the cheek bones and a black and yellow left eye. Now, 6 days later, my face has returned to normal. It has healed itself. All I did was keep the wounds clean for a couple of days. Ditto, my fingers and thumb on the left side all of which had deep cuts. All that remains are 4 small scabs on my right hand. I am certain the power of positive thinking had something to do with it but then, I am a bit of a dreamer.

Just thought I would bring you up to date.

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