Category: Parkinson’s Disease

Insomnia and Other Happenings

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I mentioned a month ago that I was trying Yet Another Drug for insomnia, and that I would reserve comment until I had been on it for awhile, since previous treatments had worked initially but not in the long term. Well, I think the long term has arrived, so I can confidently say this one works! Mostly. The drug in question is Mirtazapine. My Parkinson’s specialist told me to take half a tablet each night, and to increase to a whole tablet if the half tablet wasn’t working after about a week. It wasn’t, so I did. After a week at the increased dosage, it still wasn’t helping. So the doc told me to increase it again – to a pill and a half. Since then, I’ve been getting between five and seven hours of sleep almost every night. Five hours is not ideal, but it’s a definite improvement! However, I still have the occasional night where I wake up shortly after midnight and can’t get back to sleep. Such nights are happening no more than once a week now, and I can handle them at that frequency.

Throwback Thursday this week will be part three of the Arizona trip I took a few years ago., with the conclusion coming a week later. There will be no Throwback Thursday for the two weeks after that. Instead of writing about trips from the past, I will once again be excreting near-realtime Trip Reports. This time, I will be road-trippin’ to the South Carolina coast, mostly in the vicinity of Charleston.

In other news, I’m considering moving again. House prices are going berserk here in the Charlotte area, and I have been receiving unsolicited offers for far more than I paid when I bought my home just a year and a half ago. The obvious problem is, I would have to pay an equally inflated amount to get another house in the area. So, I’m back to where I was when I quit working a couple years ago…pondering a move to Somewhere Else. I saw in the news recently that Mankato, Kansas is offering financial incentives to folks who want to move into their fine city. But “Mankato” sounds suspiciously like “Mansquito” so I’ll probably have to pass.

Hallucinations Re-visited

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I’ve been having a couple of vision issues lately that I’d like to type about. One is definitely Parkinson’s-related hallucinations. The other may be Parkinson’s-related, but I really don’t know. Let’s start with the stuff that I’m certain is caused by Parkinson’s Disease (PD).

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve had testicular tactile hallucinations, but not the visual type. Well, that’s changed now. It started several weeks ago, and so far, it’s been pretty subtle. I don’t get, for example, visions of Godzilla popping up right in front of my face. It’s always something in my peripheral vision, and it usually starts as an object(s) that is actually there. For example, when I’m sitting at my computer desk, I can see the side of my entertainment center out of the corner of my eye. That entertainment center will slowly morph into the shape of a human being. Regardless of what the object actually is, the hallucination that it becomes is always a person. These imaginary people never move, and they never say anything. Sometimes they appear to be staring at me; other times, they’re looking elsewhere. And I always know there’s nobody there, but I turn to look, anyway – I just have to. This happened very frequently throughout the day when I was at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. It actually seems to have stopped happening now (at least for the last week).

As for the other visual weirdness, I’m not sure if it’s a PD-related hallucination for two reasons:

  1. It’s been happening for at least a few years now, and it didn’t stop happening when the peripheral vision people stopped appearing a week ago.
  2. I’m not even sure whether it’s a hallucination. It could be an eye health issue.

Imagine you have printed out a page of text. Why? That’s not important; stay focused, DAMMIT! Now imagine you have a serving tray that you stole from your neighborhood Burger King, and the tray has a thin layer of water in it. You take the printout and cut out each individual word, one by one. As you cut them out, you float each slip of paper in its place on the water in the tray. You end up with all the words in the correct order, and you can read the text with no difficulty. It’s just that each word is slowly floating around in its place, occasionally bumping into and bouncing off of another word. That’s what I see when I read text on a computer monitor – the words are individually MOVING. But not to the point of interfering with my ability to read them. Sometimes, some of the words appear to be throbbing – like someone keeps clicking the Bold button, or making small changes to the font and/or size. This has been going on with computer monitors for a few years, but on that day in the Houston Museum of Natural Science, I experienced this phenomenon with the printed text that’s posted next to the items on display. There was one exception. On one of the placards, the words weren’t moving individually nor were they throbbing. Rather, the entire placard appeared to be moving away from me.

This reminds me. I heard recently that there has been talk about trying psilocybin (the hallucinogen found in “magic mushrooms”) to treat PD. Seriously…psilocybin, LSD, and of course, THC. I doubt the federal government would decriminalize these things even if there ended up being positive medical results, so I’m not getting my hopes up.

Texas Trip Report (Days 4 and 5)

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The dawn of Day 4 found me in the “NASA suburbs” southeast of Houston. Way back in 2007, I spent five non-contiguous weeks in this area when my employer at the time had a contract with NASA. This is the first time I’ve been here in the 15 years since. I only got about three hours of sleep overnight. That combined with a weather forecast calling for “the hottest day of the year so far” (over 90 degrees Fahrenheit) led me to decide that this would be my “day off” from this vacation. So I spent most of the day inside my air-conditioned hotel room, writing for this very blog, then just drove around checking out some of my old haunts. Nothing exciting or compelling, so let’s move on.

I am a museum geek. That’s not exciting or compelling either, but that won’t stop me from writing about the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS). I spent the whole day there, and I could easily go back and spend more time! The Hall of Paleontology is the star of the show. Most natural science museums I’ve visited had one or two complete dinosaur skeletons, and lots of individual bones. HMNS has probably a dozen complete dinosaur skeletons, as well as fossilized dinosaur skin on display. And it doesn’t end with dinosaurs. They also have skeletons of mastodons, huge extinct sloths and armadillos, saber-toothed cats, and much more!

There’s also a Hall of African Wildlife (current species, not dinosaur-age beasties). Unlike many similar museums where the visitor is in the middle of the room looking into dioramas, the displays at HMNS intrude in the visitor space, allowing you to see the dead animals up close, and from several angles. This is the best natural science museum I’ve seen, hands down. No, wait! Keep your hands where I can see ’em! Now wave ’em in the air like you just don’t care. OK, stop it!

I’ve been experiencing some strange vision-related phenomena lately. I’ll try to remember to write about them in detail once I get home from this trip. In the meantime, it’s a patty melt and onion rings from Whataburger for dinner.