Adventures with PD #1
So we went to bed last night wondering what my RBD might have in store for us. For the uninitiated, RBD stands for Rem sleep Behavior Disorder. When people who don’t have RBD are sleeping, their muscles are in a state of atonia meaning their muscles are completely relaxed or paralyzed to keep them from acting out their dreams. Sounds like a good idea, right?
People with RBD don’t have this safety feature turning off the muscles, so we do act out dreams, most typically violent or active ones. RBD often shows up years before a Parkinson’s Disease diagnosis, along with anosmia (loss of the sense of smell) and can be an early warning of the fun to come.
Climbing out of the rabbit hole and back to the story: It was a dark and stormy night (no really, it was) and about 3 or 4 am I heard water running and thought our dog Gauge might have had an accident so I got up to investigate. Now remember it was a dark and stormy night, so totally dark. I started shuffling along the bedroom wall like a ninety-year old to get into the bathroom doorway, but in my halfway REM, half awake state I got lost. You have to know that my wife Teri has never met a virgin section of wall that she didn’t have a Pavlovian response to decorate, so you have to be really careful trying to figure where you are to avoid massive destruction of artwork, etc.
Another PD issue raised its ugly head at this point. The only light in the room was the alarm clock on Teri’s side of the bed, which should have been a helpful way point for most people, but PD tends to completely hose spacial awareness so that even looking at the clock was useless for me because I couldn’t figure it out. Of course, this whole time I was walking into things like shoes, the dog and a footlocker.
Eventually I found my way out of our room and also realized that (remember the “dark and stormy night”)? I was hearing water in the gutters, not the dog peeing. The sound of the running water told me I might as well pee while I was up so I waved my arms around until the Nest thermostat lit up and I could find the guest bathroom.
When I got back to bed, Teri asked me what I was doing and I said “I got lost”. Laughter ensued while she imitated what she heard. Clunk “shit!”, clunk “shit”, clunk “yelp!” Can’t wait for tonight.
Sleepless in Gartcosh
PD Paradigm shift: Brain-First versus Gut-First Parkinson’s Disease: A Hypothesis.
