I slept!

You might remember that I saw my neurologist a few weeks ago and begged her to do something about my insomnia, sleepwalking and night-time hallucinations. She diagnosed a probable REM sleep disorder. “Great”, thought the wife and I. “diagnosis precedes treatment which precedes cure (or at least improvement)”. The neurologist would consult the resident expert on REM sleep and post a prescription to me forthwith.

Well, forthwith wasn’t as quick as I expected, and time passes slowly when your head feels like a medical emergency. A week and a bit went by, then Marie rang the hospital and left a message of some desperation. Another couple of days passed, before I took things into my own hands and went to see my GP, armed with the neurologist’s tentative diagnosis. The GP happily dispensed drug A (he’s quite keen on drugs for a Dutch doctor). It was wonderful! I slept that night for the first time in months, just slept and slept and slept, almost 12 hours straight. It was absolutely glorious! Marie tells me she kept creeping into the bedroom just to enjoy the sound of my snoring.

And wouldn’t you know: the following day, as if by magic, a prescription arrives from the neurologist for drug B, a rather less powerful version of the same class of drug the GP gave me (without the benefit of expert advice). I don’t sleep like a teenager with drug B, and I feel alert enough to drive … but ooh, do I miss drug A and its lovely sledgehammer effect!

The other development of the week is that I have stopped seeing the nice physiotherapist round the corner who did the best he could for me but who I think was beginning to feel that his bag of tricks was getting rather empty. Instead, I will now go to the neighbouring town twice a week to see a specialist in movement disorders (Mensendieck therapy, if that means anything to you).

It’s early days yet, but I am feeling hopeful about this. Ms Mensendieck seems quite unfazed by my many complaints and inabilities, and she focuses on treating the causes of my problems with exercises that I can also do at home, rather than focusing (as did my previous physiotherapist) on treating the symptoms with massages and other muscle stimulation. I guess Marie will just have to take over the massages, and she is already used to giving me frequent short buzzes with the domestic sander (yes, sander) that physio #1 suggested might give some immediate relief from my back pain.

The nice Ms Mensendieck has already given me a present, a rather peculiar CD with advice on how to carry out daily activities despite having Parkinson’s. There is the slight issue with this CD that (a) it is in Dutch which I don’t speak and (b) it has been organized by a stamp collector into minute and repetitive sections, but nevertheless (c) it appears to contain valuable advice that Marie can help me decipher (not being English, she has no phobia about foreign languages).

Now I am just hoping – so very hard – that the next few weeks will prove that all my fears about aggressive forms of Parkinson’s are quite mistaken, and that many good nights’ sleep (and a lot of well-placed naps) will set me right again.