Shaky Places and DBS

I’m usually the first to object to self-promotion. With a brand-new book, a little horn-blowing may be in order, nonetheless. After all, "Shaky Places: How Parkinson’s Altered an Artist on a (Mostly) Metaphorical Road Trip" won’t sell itself.

I got my diagnosis in 2019. After earning an art degree from the University of California at Davis, spending twenty-five years in the printing industry and overseeing some literary experiments of my own, I heard the news when I was forty-nine years old (barely under the wire for early onset). Why not record my dwindling ability and tell my story in a memoir? Thirty-six sketches would track my progress. Before I had begun the project, my neurologist suggested deep brain stimulation. Well, okay.

My surgeon, who’s performed more than two-hundred-and-fifty of these operations, claims that he’s never seen results like mine before. Spoiler alert: my formerly tremoring right hand, the one that I use to draw, is totally still. Even with the device deactivated completely, my digits are steady as a rock. The “honeymoon period”, which typically lasts a week or so, has yet to end. Even now, almost two years later, there’s no hint of any resurgence. Was I just lucky or did my struggles with a pen and paper create the neuroplasticity that began to rewire my brain? My Parkinson’s isn’t cured, by any means, but at least now I am allowed a favorite mode of expression.

What are the odds? Would a guy who was writing and illustrating a manuscript experience such relief coincidentally? Was it wishful thinking to imagine that my art played a bigger role? The doctor credits micro-lesioning. He finds it likely that he killed a tiny portion of my brain, citing the hemorrhage that got me readmitted to the hospital (after an ambulance ride to the emergency room) the morning after the procedure. Which is it: depicting different scenes for Shaky Places, a medical accident, neither or both? I may never know and, frankly, given the outcome, I shouldn’t ask too many questions.

I feel like a fog has descended. Are my cognitive faculties subsiding or am I simply free to focus on the transformation now? My time as an author might have already passed. That’s alright. Another career is within my reach again.