Back Into the Fray

Here we go again.

I'll be honest -- I don't know how often I can post to this thing. Since I've been outed as far as having Parkinson's Disease goes (on Neil Gaiman's blog, no less, which is one step down -- or to the side -- from the Word Of God), it does me no good to keep being coy about it. This is probably a good thing, all in all; at least it gives me a legitimate reason to not feel obligated to post every damn day.

Anyway -- yes, I have PD. (Actually, I prefer to call it Michael J. Fox's Disease, because if you have someone young, courageous and charismatic publicly fighting the disease, it makes more sense to capitalize on that than to name it after some stodgy 19th Century physician no one's ever heard of. But that's just me.) I've had it for over 15 years, and for much of the time it hasn't been that big a deal, especially after my first DBS (that's Deep Brain Surgery; basically a pacemaker in the ol' noggin). Lately, though, after having it done again (each procedure takes care of one hemisphere, so the maximum number of operations is 2; the third one referred to on Neil's blog is a readjustment), I've had a lot of problems -- the biggest being my vocal chords atrophying. I haven't been able to speak coherently for 6 months, and while there are those who don't consider that a bad thing, it's damned inconvenient as far as I'm concerned.

So, anyway, I've decided to go public with it. I'll try to post regularly, but my typing speed is down from 90 words a minute to 90 words a day, if I'm lucky, so don't get your hopes too high.

(And just in case you're wondering -- no, this won't be totally about having PD. I'll talk about other things, too.)

More soon ...