Since late winter I've been dealing with muscle tremor.
First my left leg - occasionally, then steadily - now my left hand.
I saw a neurologist in midsummer. He did some physical "tests" - write this, hold this, walk there - and concluded that the shaking was likely "essential tremor", a relatively benign symptom of brain function desuetude that accompanies aging.
But he wanted to see me again this winter to rule out Parkinson's Disease.
Well, the shaking has grown slowly worse. Not shocking or scarily so...
...until last weekend. When I realized that I was salivating. Constantly.
The fancy name for this is "sialorrhea", and it's just plain old drooling. It's to the point where I have to carry around a spit cup like some goober sucking on a bag of worm dirt (that's "snuff" for you non-Eighties-GIs).
Point is...the drooling is strongly - as in reeeeeally strongly - associated with Parkinson's, or other severe neurological issues like ALS.
So.
It's VERY likely I have Parkinson's.
I'm going to call the neurologist Monday to try and get seen ASAP. While Parkinson's has no cure there are treatments that can help quality of life.
It's going to kill me.
But I won't go easy. I'll fight as long as my life is worth fighting for.
But I thought I'd just say this here and now, so you few remaining readers would know where I'm coming from. It's...not a good place.
This is because I'm on my third day of two weeks covering a grading job in Medford, down in Oregon's Dixie. I'm fairly dirty and tired and bored of eating bad food and living out of a suitcase and it's only the third fucking day, ferchrissakes. I tried to think of something more uptempo and realized I just wanted something slow and kind of dreamy and sad.
Here come the priests, each one wailing and bemoaning
Lordy, they got their heads bowed down
Here come the madmen, they're too excited for atoning:
"Burn the mosque," they're shouting, "Burn it down!"
Hard to believe that Carly wrote that something like forty years ago. Damn.
It's been something of a difficult autumn for me. The Boy is ever more difficult, apparently because he has some variation of "attention-deficit disorder" which, apparently, also makes you kind of an asshole. The real irking part is that he's only an asshole to my Bride, who is the sweet, loving parent (as opposed to the irascible, impatient, demanding, um, well, me...) and who has busted her butt to try and make things easier for him. Well, he's burning that bridge like a torch in the night and driving his little sister - who is a really loving little soul - completely out of patience with him.
The real problem with this is that my presence - even if I'm not looming over him in a sort of Evil Stepdaddy sort of way - seems to turn the little bugger's Asshole down to background noise. It's when I leave for an extended time - as I have now - that Satan's Child comes roaring back out. It drives me nuts, because my Bride takes the hammer and there's nothing that I can do.
And just in case I didn't have anything to feel sorry for myself about, my right hip has decided that being a small, nagging sort of irritation isn't really fun, so it's gone flat-out, full-throttle, shove-the-shank-in-and-leave-it-and-cripple-the-sonofabitch. I can still walk, sort of, with a really awful torquing sort of motion that resembles nothing so much as Igor in the old Frankenstein flicks. But it hurts, hurts like a bastard. I don't even want to talk about putting a sock on my right foot; sometimes I've been that close to tears as the simple act of putting a tube of cloth on a piece of muscle and bome less than three feet away from my hand is just flat out frigging impossible.
I've come to dread these away-from-home trips just because I fear that I'm going to get up one morning and no amount of effort will let me put my sock on or tie my bootlace and I will have to go, barefoot, to some horrified stranger asking for help like a beggar in the marketplace.
My replacement date is now in March, because my current employer - for whom I worked for years back in the day has concluded that my "period of employment" dates only from my RE-hiring in February of this year. Which means I am ineligible for medical disability leave or paid benefits until after that date in 2016.
So I shamble around like some spastic zombie and curse my leg and my ill-fortune.
But enough self-pity, dammit.
I wanted to throw this up before I go, though; it's the full album from which I got the Karen Alexander song Brown Shoes I posted here a while back. If you're looking for something fun and uptempo, forward to 23:00 and the song Baghdad Ragman. You want hooky?
"Hussein the barber's got a razor like a saber, and
Hassan the butcher has a brother who's a baker, and
The whole bazaar it hums like a song, and
The Baghdad ragman comes with the dawn..."
