A Little Help from My Friends
by Venetia Bradfield
2. The Call to Adventure
I knew it! I knew something was going on with me neurologically. I could smell it. It reeked of a benthic organism, creeping along the murky depths of the ocean floor in search of prey.
March, 2019
I heard it even before I smelled it. It started with an odd clicking. It was like my ears were ringing, but it was more of a clicking noise. It came on late in the day and lasted half an hour. Then it lasted longer, until I clicked for an hour at the end of every day. As the clicking grew louder, it lasted longer - day after day after day. I began to take to my bed when the incessant clicking came on, tortured until it would abate for the night. I wondered if I was going crazy, but as my mom used to say: “When you think you’re going crazy, you’re not. It’s when you don’t realize you are crazy that it’s really happening.” Not very comforting. After several months of this nightly aural horror, the clicking slowed down. And then, as quickly as it had appeared, it was gone.
I saw it as my beautiful handwriting turned ugly. When I wrote my hand would move faster and faster while my writing got smaller and smaller. I watched in disbelief as I couldn’t slow down my hand. Soon I was having difficulty reading my own writing. That was terrifying. It didn’t bode well at the hospital, where I had to take report on my patients at the beginning of my shifts, then give report twelve hours later at the end of them. “Let’s see, this patient’s MRA number is 129756… or maybe it’s 129155…and she has hypo… oh wait a minute… hyperthyroidism.”
I felt it in my entire body. I had become so slow-moving! It took me such a long time to get dressed in the morning. Simply getting out of bed had become a slow-motion chore. If I dropped something on the floor, it seemed a long way down, as I slowly stooped to pick it up. My “good” knee hurt. The one that hadn’t been reconstructed. It hurt more and more until I couldn’t ignore it. Not only my knee, but my whole body felt stiff. No amount of stretching could ease the stiffness. Still doesn’t.
July 20, 2020
I sat alone, waiting for Dr. Dread, the neurologist who breezed into the room in her thirty-something splendor, high-heels clicking. By comparison, I felt old and slow and unpolished. She asked me to walk, to turn, to tap my fingers, and stand from a seated position.
I could do all those things, but she too, must have noticed the over-sized fangs of the viperfish chomping at the dopaminergic neurons in my brain. It didn’t take long before she announced, “You are suspicious for Parkinsonism.”
She may have said more, but that’s all I heard. My jaw dropped. My world bottomed out. I shrank to the size of the viperfish that was attacking my brain. Only twelve inches long, they attract their prey in the darkness of the ocean bottom through bioluminescence. My photophore flickered on when Dr. Dread added, “Take this prescription and come back in six months.” Then she gathered up her papers and told me she had to get on to her next patient.
“Wait a minute,” I shouted. “I’m scared!” The neurologist replied calmly, “Scared of what?” I wanted to scream, “Everything!” but managed only to whisper, “Dementia.” My mother had recently died of Alzheimer’s, and a year before that my sister had died of MSA, Multiple Systems Atrophy, a rare and horrible form of Parkinson’s in which every system in the body grinds to a halt in the space of about fifteen years. What little I knew of idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease was that it sometimes included a dimension of dementia. She countered with, “Don’t worry, lots of people with PD never develop dementia,” and with that - she skipped out the door, her high heels clicking down the hallway. I was abandoned at the moment of diagnosis. Dr. Dread sucked the air out of the room with her as she ran, while I struggled to draw my next breath.
Alone, I called out to the emptiness in the room, “Wait! Come back! What do you mean by “suspicious of Parkinsonism? You’re really going to leave me here all alone, wondering how quickly the viperfish will devour me?” I sat there in disbelief for what seemed like a very long time, the acidic taste in my mouth gnawing at the back of my throat. And then I left, stumbling out the door and down the hall, through the elevator, past all the people looking the other direction in their masks of Covid isolation, the trajectory of the pandemic nearing its peak.
Home alone, in my tiny quiet studio, I got ready to leave for work early the next morning. I must have eaten something, I probably took a shower, I surely slept a little bit… but I couldn’t stop thinking about the viperfish swimming around in my brain, and how I would have to introduce him to my children, who would be so worried about me when they were forced to make his acquaintance.