Yesterday was a good day, symptom-wise. Today is a bad day. Parkinson’s is like that – you never know from day to day, from hour to hour, from minute to minute even, just what it’s going to throw at you. I thought that my mood and motivation were improved following the addition of a couple of tablespoons of coconut oil to my diet, but the way I’m feeling today kind of blows that out of the water, so I guess any improvement that I felt was imagined, or a result of the placebo effect. I’m feeling completely exhausted, fighting off sleep again, and also grumpy, stressed and completely unmotivated. I’m very shaky today too, and I can’t exactly blame it on strenuous activity over the past few days (because there hasn’t been any), so I decide to increase the stimulation delivered by my DBS. I increase the voltage on both sides of my neurostimulator by 0.1 volt (so I’m now receiving 2.7 volts on my left side, and 2.4 volts on my right side). Immediately my tremor is reduced, but I notice a significant increase in the volume of my tinnitus. It seems that everything has a price – I just hope that dyskinesia doesn’t increase as well, or my voice get any weaker and indistinct!
I try to motivate myself to do a little more editing of my neighbour’s safari holiday video, and I’m successful (to a degree) – I manage to do about an hour of editing before tiring of it.
The dog motivates me to take her for her 2 walks today, and these are the only times that I leave the house. I manage to motivate myself to give the kitchen a bit of a tidy and to vacuum downstairs before my wife returns home from work, principally so that I have something else to write about – so this blog does have a positive effect on my life!