Slept well and woke at 6am. I have quite a lot of tremor going on this morning, and switch on my device well before I decide to crawl out of bed. I haven’t upped the stimulation on the left as yet, and think I’ll hang fire and see how the day goes.
My wife disappears off to go swimming with our granddaughter, so I take the dog for a morning walk and then sit down, drink tea, scoff biscuits and check my email. My tremor is still strong in my left leg, so I decide to increase the voltage by 01.v – now 1.2v on the left, still 1.6v on the right. I feel the tremor decrease almost immediately. Hope the dyskinesia in my neck stays away. I’d really love to increase the voltage on the right hand side as well, but I know it will make the dyskinesia in my right arm unbearable.
My car has been sitting on the road, unused, outside our house for the last 7 weeks. My wife drove it just the once, at my request, to keep everything from seizing up. I have been out and started it on a couple of occasions, but it hasn’t been started for a couple of weeks now, and the battery is almost completely dead. My wife returns, and I nick her car to jump start mine. The engine starts, and sounds so nice I just have to take her for a spin. It feels good to be driving again – the first time in about 3 or 4 months.
My wife and I are going to dinner at her eldest son’s house this evening, and before we leave home I decide I need to spruce myself up a little – my hair is getting quite long (for me) and my stubble is fast becoming a beard. I usually cut my hair very short – grade 1 – and I’m a little bit nervous about running the clippers over my newly misshapen head. My wife offers to do it for me, and I gratefully accept. It feels good to have short hair again. I also have a shave. Always a wet shave – never used an electric razor in my life. It’s quite a challenge with the dyskinesia but I manage to make a half decent job, with only minimal bloodshed, and look and feel a bit more human.
When we get home and go to bed, I switch my device off as usual. My tremor returns pretty much immediately, and for the first time I really do struggle to relax my muscles and get to sleep. I get there eventually, but I was thinking I’d have to switch the power back on. It just goes to show how my Parkinson’s is continuing to progress in the background…