I participated in a clinical trial of focused ultrasound treatment for Parkinson’s disease. I was treated at Stanford University hospital. 15 participants were given the treatment, but I was one of the five participants assigned to the placebo group. The assignment was blinded.to participants. In the aftermath of my fake treatment, I thought that I had increased muscle flexibility. But as time went by, I started to think that I has been assigned to the placebo group. This was disclosed when participants’ assignments were revealed. Instead of regarding my receipt of no treatment as a message from God that I should forego it, I elected to avail myself of the offer of getting the real procedure. I was treated two weeks after the study was unblinded. For the treatment, I was helmeted and attached to a machine that looked like an MRI scanner, and I counted 10 zaps of ultrasound before I was freed from the restraints. Each administration of the ultrasound felt like a dozen migraine headaches. I don’t recall what specific part of my brain was targeted except that it was in the right hemisphere because my primary symptom of Parkinson’s was a tremor in my left wrist. I should add that the clinical trial’s primary purpose was to determine whether the treatment could help to prevent dyskinesia. I had started experiencing very mild symptoms of such involuntary muscle twisting, and the treatment did result in the disappearance of those. However, the left wrist tremor remained unchanged.
In the months following the treatment, I returned to Stanford at increasingly spaced intervals for follow-up testing—after one week, followed by two, four (one month), three months six months, and then one and two years. At these follow-up visits, I was asked not to take any medications earlier on the day of the visit, and after a series of tests, I was administered a fast-acting dose of carbodopa-levidopa, and after an interval of about a half hour, I was asked to move various body parts once again. My fluidity, gait, and balance in walking were also observed both before and after I was given the medication. While I did not record just what instruments were administered on these return visits to the clinic, I recollect that they focused primarily on my physical condition. There were also tests of my cognitive abilities, but nothing to examine how the treatment of the brain had affected my mind in the emotional realm. Meanwhile, back in everyday life, things were falling apart. On the night following the treatment, I experienced hallucinations for the first time. These manifested themselves in two ways. First, I was looking at pillows and pieces of furniture and seeing people. That was not frightening, but it certainly was peculiar. After I returned home, one day I addressed four bales of sound insulation, imagining they were nurses. Second, I was seeing things that weren’t there that were interfering with my ability to see what was actually in front of me. Sometimes it looked as if portions of my memory had been cut loose and were floating by in my field of vision. As a classical violinist, I had spent countless hours looking at music, and some of these floating objects appeared to be sheets of music.
In the aftermath of the treatment, I drove into a mall in Sunnyvale that was adjacent to a business park and couldn’t find my way out. I had to dial 911 to get law officers to lead me out. Once I was back on my home,turf, I couldn’t find where I’d parked my vehicle in the lot of a familiar music store and had to call the proprietor to find me and take me back. I was blocks away. I even made a wrong turn on the way home on the one road available fo get to and from my house (Spoiler alert: these issues have fortunately abated). Sometimes I had trouble identifying which was the right way to go at an intersection. That confusion, and my erratic driving, got my driver’s license suspended, putting me in a compromised situation because I was living in a fairly remote area with no public transportation.
The worst outcome of the ultrasound was that it seemed to have turned off the left hemisphere of my brain, leaving me with no executive function and at the whims of my kind and compassionate but often idiotic right brain. I stopped keeping records and paying some bills, after six decades of building a spotless credit record of flawlessly paying bills on time and building up a credit rating into the 800s. Worse yet, my compromised judgment left me vulnerable to scammers, who preyed on my emotions with one hand, only to try to empty my pockets with the other. Many of the perpetrators are quite skilled at what they do; once I had wised up, I was able to avoid allowing a cartel to use my bank account to launder money, and I gave a caller most of the information on a credit card, but once I had declined to provide the security code, saying, “But that would allow you to make purchases and charge them to me,” exclaimed, “Motherfucker!”, and slammed down the phone. The storyline for that scam was that the company would consolidate my debts and reduce my monthly payments. I received a call from the same company on each of the next two days to solicit my business, and I told them that I wouldn’t do business with them unless they could show me where in their training manual it said to call prospective clients motherfuckers. But I digress. Getting wind of my self-destructive behavior, some of my friends began to become appropriately concerned. The capstone of my folly was selling just over an acre of land in a neighbor who had hounded me to do so, which I agreed to do at a small fraction of its market value. Not only did I sign a bill of sale that plainly showed that the price listed on it revealed that he was paying me less than the amount we had agreed upon, but the document also smuggled in as the description of the property I had sold him not only my entire parcel of land, more than seven acres, but also all of the buildings on it. I didn’t catch any of that until I had finally recovered from the surgery and went online to check my property deed, only to discover that it has his name on it.
.. to be continued
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