Saturday, April 13, 2013

Personal check-in / Torso shakes are back...

I have a feeling like electricity running all through my body when I wake up in the morning. Even if I take slow-release Sinemet CR at bed time, it just feels like I am vibrating internally, through my trunk, legs, arms, everywhere. Some people with Lyme disease report this, and it can be the result of infection, but I'm wondering if people with Parkinson's do, too. It's a very high speed feeling. Not like an 8 cps tremor – it's faster – but a tremor sensation, nonetheless. I felt it most strongly in the heart area when it first began a few years ago, but now it is spreading through the whole body. It usually decreases when the Sinemet, etc kicks in. (I'm taking (1) 25-100 Sinemet, 2 mg Artane, and 100 mg of gabapentin, every four hours that I am awake.)

For a couple of years, I could make this feeling go away if I sat quietly and closed my eyes to meditate. It would just vanish, so long as I stayed meditating. Meaning, within the meditation session. So, that was a lovely way to still be awake and experience non-tremor in any part of the body. My whole body would just relax and feel very calm and centered. But I guess things have progressed. Or regressed. Now the sensation is much stronger and I require some pharmaceutical help for that to work.

Of course I have the usual worries that I've created a monster. By taking Sinemet, have I reduced my brain's ability to produce dopamine? And then the downward spiral of having to take ever-larger doses, eventually accompanied by dyskinesias.

I had a long talk with my Lyme doctor yesterday about all kinds of things, including heavy metal detox strategies. I'm going to begin on those hopefully next week. We'll do a challenge test using a heavy metals chelator such as DMPS or DMSA, and a six-hour urine collection. Then look for the metals. Then, based on that, we'll figure out a detox protocol which will probably entail - among other things - using intravenous glutathione and phosphatidylcholine (PC, for short).

I'm starting to see faint tremoring in my left fingers. This is a drag. My left hand was the steady one, and seemed invulnerable, or at least I hoped it was. But, as people with PD know, unilateral appearance of PD is typical, slowly spreading to bilateral. In my case, the strange thing is that I have had kind of a cross wiring, with my right arm and my left leg first affected. Then the right foot, and now beginnings of the left hand. If anybody knows if the cross-wiring thing is indicative of anything in particular, please comment. [To comment you have to open an article by double-clicking on it in this list. The post opens then, with a comment window below it.]

I made a video of close-ups of my hands so you can see the tremoring. I'll see if I can post it to YouTube and add it here, later.

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