I wake at 7.30am after a solid night’s sleep. I consider getting up. I blink, and it’s 8.45am. I want to make some more progress with the bathroom tiling today. so I get up and go downstairs to check my email and social media before I get my hands dirty. I also have a couple of cups of tea, a Nutriblast and then take the dog for a walk.
We are having visitors for dinner this evening – my wife’s two sons and their respective partners, our granddaughter, my wife’s ex-husband and his partner – so my wife goes off to North Walsham to buy the ingredients for a Thai green curry, a vegetable lasagne and a lemon cheesecake, leaving me to get on with the bathroom tiling. I work away for a couple of hours, and then I have had enough – fatigue is causing my tremor to emerge (big time), I have got terrible back pain (again) and I’m just plain tired out. It’s only when I try to do something like this that I realise how much energy Parkinson’s Disease has stolen from me. I take the dog for another walk before I sit down – once I sit down, it’s going to be difficult to stand up again!
Whilst I have been working away, my wife has been taking it easy in the kitchen – not only making the curry, lasagne and the cheesecake, but a load of Easter fairy cakes as well (very sweet and sickly, yet strangely irresistible).
Our visitors arrive and, in no time at all, the food is scoffed, drinks are drunk, and enormous quantities of chocolatey sweetness is consumed.
I self-medicate (cannabis) after an hour or so – my tremor is still breaking through, and muscular pain in my arms is most uncomfortable. The cannabis works its little miracle and I feel a whole lot better.
By the time our guests depart (which isn’t very late) I could happily go to bed, but we have our baths and watch an episode of Homeland on Netflix instead.
Ian, I so completely understand your comment about the energy Parkinson’s takes from you. And the soreness and stiffness in your body for seemingly doing nothing to warrant it. I grow weary just changing the sheets on my bed. Every other day I drive about 25 – 30 minutes to visit my mother at the facility she is in because she has dementia and by the time I arrive I have difficulty getting out of the car and beginning to walk into her building because my body has “frozen”. The DBS greatly diminished my tremors; I wish it was effective on the stiffness and body pains.
Hi Myrna
My DBS did actually help my Bradykinesia and stiffness when it was initially programmed. Unfortunately, those settings also caused some impulsive behaviour, so they had to be changed…
Cheers,
Ian